Creator already exceeded 100wpm and said it works equally well for random strings iirc.
Not quite sure how to think about the ergonomics though. This is different from steno as each chord only produces one letter, so on average there are nominally more keystrokes than letters produced. Exclusive chording probably also don’t work too well with keywells etc with uneven key heights. Would be interesting to know long term effect regarding comfort/stress
I come from Microsoft sculpt where the wrist rest is built to raise your wrist higher than the finger tips (reverse tilting). If you bend your wrist down (i.e. toward the desk), then your fingers naturally curl down, whereas if you raise your wrist up (like on the MS natural), then your fingers are naturally more extended. From an ergonomics perspective, it is better to have your wrist neutral or slightly raised than to have them bent down. In that case, the top row typically requires less effort than the bottom row (particularly when reverse tilted). Now whether or not that’s more comfortable also depends on how often do you encounter bigrams like ‘dr’ – or worse, ‘cr’ – on qwerty, where you have to extend index on rows above the middle finger (these are the ‘half’ and ‘full’ scissors, respectively, in layout analyzers). The discomfort of top row index often comes from these type of scissor bigrams and is alleviated when it’s possible to also extend the middle finger slightly at the same time. Curling index finger is a move more independent of middle finger placement (but that doesn’t mean less effort/stress on the tendon, particularly for wrist up folks). In other words it’s possible for a key to both be more comfortable and incur more effort/stress at the same time.
I’m not sure, from the description of your wrist rest arrangement, if you are in the ‘wrist up’ or ‘wrist down’ camp. But certainly for wrist down folks, I can imagine the bottom row being more comfortable for the index.
True that. I’m definitely not promoting “layout of the month” type of thing :D
My first foray into alt layout provided some intuition of what aspects of a layout are important to me personally and how they translate to various metrics. After that I make use of analyzers to evaluate different layouts without physically trying them out. I only transitioned to my current layout after becoming relatively sure – through the analyzers – it’s something I’d stick to. I was mainly talking about this second transition being easier than learning the first one.
Speaking of analyzers, take a look at clemenpine’s keysolve and oxey’s layout playground
There is also an extensive alt layout document compiled by ec0vid.
Contour definitely helps! I’ve also seen people resting not exactly on the home row but slightly shifted upward/downward depending on the layout.
Hey just anecdotal, but I find the first alt layout to be the most difficult (I went from long time dvorak to semimak if that matters). My brain started adapting to the fact that it has to adapt to new layouts once I started experimenting more alt layouts. Point is, don’t get stuck on colemak 😅.
Agree on both accounts. I have ‘d’ on top row mid finger, right above ‘h’ on home row mid finger. ‘e’ on vowel hand thumb.
The point about frequency of ‘d’ being too high is with respect to having it on the index bottom row (as in the dh variant), because of the curling gesture it incurs. The index finger is tricky because being a long finger, it is comparatively better to extend up than to curl down (assuming your wrist is neutral or slightly raised), but top row index position will usually find bigrams with mid finger home row, making it a scissor (qwerty ‘dr’) and uncomfortable. Given it’s reign over 6 keys, it is better suited for less-frequent letters on the non-home positions. ‘d’ would be borderline acceptable in terms of frequency, and for reducing incessant curling, inner column center row (qwerty ‘g’) is a better placement – this is what dvorak, maltron, and rsthd opted for (but keep in mind this makes it more prone to the lateral stretch problem). But the better choices are from the ‘mfpgwybv’ pack, and perhaps ‘c’ to a lesser degree due to its frequency.
It is not so much about relative distance to the home position. The more important measure is if there are lots of bigrams to be pressed by the middle finger on the same hand – it is believed that a lateral stretch, meaning having to press a key on the central index columns, right next to another key on the same hand middle finger column (e.g., a qwerty ‘gd’), is more uncomfortable than if the index key is on the home column (a qwerty ‘vd’). This is the logic behind the dh mod.
Personally I think both ‘d’ and ‘h’ are of too high a frequency to be placed on the index finger non-home position, so neither the vanilla nor the dh variant of colemak is good in that regard.
One argument for moving space to a specific hand is so space is assigned to the vowel hand. If you are on a layout with definitive vowel / consonant hand split, then the theory goes that it is more frequent for words (at least in English) to begin with a consonant, and separately, also end with a consonant. By having space on the vowel hand, you are promoting hand alternation.
Personally I have vowels on the left hand but still use right thumb for space. I do have ‘e’ on left thumb, but right hand thumb has been a habit since I learned qwerty on a mechanical typewriter…
LOL usability didn’t occur to me somehow. Was totally immersed in the beauty of it 😍
This really looks like it should be fitted on a spherical surface. Maybe a huge soccer trackball. That would be a spherical version of the keymouse
If you want ergonomics, go for ProArc EM03 fingerball (and the Nulea / Sanwa variations, all MTE clones). If you want more buttons, go for the Elecom Huge. FWIW, I stopped using the Huge after getting the ProArc (much better ergonomics)
Semimak is an excellent layout, have fun switching!
Nowadays I’m mostly using a layout that I made based on the original Maltron layout as designed by Lillian Malt (where you put ‘e’ on a thumb key, and ‘s’ on the vowel hand index home position) and only fall back to dvorak as a last resort (travel on a laptop etc.) It’s more about reducing the use of bottom row mid/ring/pinkies than speed or other related statistics (the theory is that by restricting them to the top two rows, they stay longer in their more natural curvature, thereby reducing tendon stress). With ‘e’ on a thumb, you avoid the double stacking of the vowel cluster of most modern layouts, but still have the vowel hand index finger freed up for consonants, which then makes it easier to only have infrequent letters on non-index bottom row.
I typed dvorak at about the same speed as you, and got up to 110~120 on semimak when I tested it, before moving on. I have no doubt I could have gone faster by keeping at it (my problem was with the stuffy feeling of the 3-finger vowel cluster), so I think you’ll have no problem exceeding your dvorak speed. During my test drive, I was able to switch back to fluent dvorak typing after perhaps an hour or two of acclimatization (fwiw, I mirrored the left/right hands on semimak, which eased the learning, but may have made frequent switch more difficult.) A different physical keyboard may help: I did find it easier to switch back on my Microsoft Natural, which is what I used for years with dvorak.
IIRC, Xah Lee in his review specifically mentioned that glove80 are better suited for smaller hands than KA360 as it feels more compact. Having a different pinky column curvature probably also helps. I’d also be interested to know if glove80 is factually more compact (in terms of e.g. key spacing).
Take a look at u/noneagoninf 's reviews here for more first hand experiences.
May not be what you are looking for, but I’d look into either a chair mount or an under-the-desk keyboard tray.
Getting it to make a sound is (probably) easy but realistically emulating piano action would be really hard. Reputable electronic pianos all mimic real piano mechanics to a degree, e.g., the visible portion of an individual key is only a fraction of its entire length in order to give you the “weight” and “speed” of the real key action, which would be hard to reproduce with e.g. a shorter key + spring. A search of “hammer actions” should give you some idea