keyboards VS Canary

I have custom alpha layers and extremely optimized symbol layers, combos and other features in my keymap. It is not designed for web development, but it is good for VIM and Java.

That made me think. If I would adapt Romak for 20 keys, it would be something like this:

But since you are a programmer, I invite you to check the fancy programmer features that I have implemented in my keymap. I still need to rework on the documentation, but you can take some inspiration from there if you decide to design your own.

Romak also has some very nice attributes, as do poqtea and uciea. I also find Canary to have a lot of merit.

There is also the unusual option to handwire a keyboard without soldering, as I did here, but the result might not be so reliable.

You can see my layout here.

I started my own layout, Romak, using BEAKL as inspiration, with similar objectives, mostly making it more suitable for my home language and reducing the load on pinkies and indexes, concentrating in the middle and ring fingers instead. Another thing I did was to remove the top row key from both the central and pinkie columns. Later I also removed the bottom row key from the pinkies.

My first handwired board checks all your requirements, and I have some pictures of the process, but it is not a complete guide. It might help though. And I think the FFKB case can be great for a first handwired project.

Really nice work, congrats. My custom layout is designed for both Portuguese and English, and I have some of the same ideas implemented, with similar reasoning. I also have some programming features that remind yours, but I preferred to remap hjkl instead.

I've used two different options in my builds. You can see them in the build logs: FFKB and Rommana.

https://github.com/Apsu/Canary I don't understand the sections on row stagger and angle mod. Please could someone explain in simple terms where to rest my fingers and which finger to use for each key. Thank you so much.

Keyboard layouts that are worth checking out are Canary, Graphite and Semimak. From what I understand they have all been made in the last two years. I'm biased in favor of Canary as it's very similar to Colemak which made the switch easy for me and I find it really comfortable, but the only thing that really matters is your personal experience when actually typing on the layout, not all the statistics that some people obsess over endlessly.

At https://github.com/Apsu/Canary, it's stated that Canary has 55% of all trigrams as rolls.

Try Canary layout https://github.com/Apsu/Canary It is very similar to Colemak DH and having E and U at different fingers. But, E and O is now at the same finger, isn’t that an issue for French typing?

Romak also has some very nice attributes, as do poqtea and uciea. I also find Canary to have a lot of merit.

My current layout, Canary, wouldn't be a great fit for this board, as with the reduction of six keys from a 34-key layout, six letters would be need to be under either a combo or layer, which I'm not too comfortable with.

I use hrm with canary layout, which puts the most used keys on the home row, so that means that I tap on the hrm keys the most. And I have pretty much 0 mistakes.

The homepages for Semimak JQ and Sturdy include thoughts by their respective creators on the layouts' strengths and weaknesses, though surely with a little bias =) The Canary homepage has detailed description of its Colemak-inspired design.

I use Canary ortho https://github.com/Apsu/Canary

Quick note about ortho vs column stagger vs row stagger when it comes to layouts: they generally don't make a difference, though sometimes you still want to make a change. This is most often with regards to upper + lower inner index vs howerow inner index, like on Canary (note the difference between the indexes of the ortho and the regular variant).