keyboards VS keygen

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.

This makes it hard to find alt layouts that feel comfortable with Vim. I've tried RSTHD, BEAKL 15, ISRT, and a couple failed attempts at designing my own layout with xsznix's optimizer. Maybe I am just picky. I currently use Dvorak, which has nice j k positions, but of course it is an old layout that is beat in many metrics by more recent layouts.

There are also tools to optimise the layout based on the text & rules you like, for example: https://github.com/xsznix/keygen.

In addition to KLA, check out the ADNW Optimising keyboard layouts program (C++). If you're into Rust, look at the RSTHD keygen. Note that they all have their own peculiarities/biases and none of them should be used blindly. Understand what their various e.g. penalties are and tweak their code/configs to better match your personal needs and corpus.

I forked xsznix/keygen (origin of RSTHD layout), tweaked it with my own weightings as well as generally playing around with the code a bit, and here’s what came out:

It's computationally intensive task and it takes time to optimize layout, people spend weeks on full optimizations, hours and days in more simple cases. There are several optimizers like carpalx, opt, keygen etc.

For instance the RSTHD creater has created a rust program that optimizes a layout using efforts for certain keys: https://github.com/xsznix/keygen There are other similar programs out there as well.