Ortholinear Keyboard - G farther than Q

[thisLexic]

I love it. I'm still trying to learn the layout but I can feel the massive improvement over QWERTY. Great layout.

Now, for my idea, the G feels so much further than the Q on ortholinear keyboards so I'm considering swapping the positions of the two since the G is so much more common than the Q in the English language. Even on staggered keyboards I'm considering doing it for uniformity's sake. Any thoughts?

[dumblob]

Oh, this'll be difficult because ortholinear keyboard violates the number one premise of Halmak - see the base measured data for the AI algorithm: https://github.com/MadRabbit/keyboard-analytics .

[kaievns]

hey there, apologies for the massive lag with a response in here.

for what it worth, I agree that ortho keyboards need a recalibration from the measurement perspective. the reason I wouldn't do that is because there are no ortho laptops out there. I don't know about you, but I switch between a laptop and an external ortho keyboard all the time, and although there are definite discrepancies, I think Halmak translates to ortho quite well, because most of it's mechanics work around the home and the top rows. And I value the interoperability.

Ortho is kind of a separate topic, I poked at it a fair bit in the last couple of years, and I don't necessarily agree that it's a good thing for the bottom row. Because, your hands always sit at an angle, so having the bottom row shifted by .5h makes a lot of sense, you might even feel it, how neat the Y button is in halmak; it works. There are also people who abuse the |\ button on ISO keyboards the same way in custom layouts and assign letters to them, it's kinda neat.

I get the whole ortho craze lately, those keyboards definitely look dope, but I don't necessarily agree that they are ergonomically better. I wish we would meet in the middle: ortho top two rows and a shifted bottom, expanded to the left ISO style.

Anyways, just my two cents. If you feel like swapping buttons, definitely go and swap! It's not like halmak is a god sent immutable standard, haha :) maybe you'll run into something better and we all benefit from that ;)

[dumblob]

Thanks for sharing your experience @madrabbit . I agree and in one breath I add that the disadvantages of "traditional" ortholinear keyboards should be largely alleviated by having a "split" ortholinear keyboard.

Some years ago I've even made preliminary attempts to design a split keyboard for an off-the-shelf notebook but didn't get far enough to publish any results. I can only tell you it's not in the realm of sci-fi.