keygen VS halmak

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.

Since you asked in the video about ideal keymapping, I thought I'd throw my preferred layout, Halmak, out there: check it out: https://github.com/MadRabbit/halmak. it takes into account key frequency as well as key combination frequency. I don't know if it the best layout theoretically possible but,well, I think it's neat

And now I'm actually quite interested in trying out the HALMAK layout ... https://github.com/MadRabbit/halmak ... a very recent AI optimized configuration that's apparently 134% more efficient than QUERTY.

Considered both of those plus some others, but decided that if I was going to dive in with an alternate layout I was going to go all in, so I'm stepping straight to Halmak, though obviously there's some slight adjustments to fit it down to 42 keys. Assuming that goes well, it's what I'll be putting on my lumberjacks and eventually sofle when those get built. All my staggered boards will be staying qwerty though so I have something to game on without changing every keybinding, and so that I don't render myself incapable of using other people's boards.

An AI designed keyboard layout\ (77 comments)