Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts

There are a lot of keyboard layouts today. There's your standard QWERTY, and there's the more efficient Dvorak. That's good enough, right? No. Apparently, a lot people are making a lot layouts. Some are specialized on a particular language (For example, German, Spanish), some aim for easier transition from QWERTY, some are designed for programers. This page is a list of them.

Keyboard Layout Heatmap

Bigger circle means more frequently used.

QWERTY (1870)

The good old QWERTY, familiar to everyone. The QWERTY layout came from typewriters, around 1870s. See Keyboard Design Flaws.

Dvorak (1936)

The Dvorak layout, the first layout designed for efficiency, in year 1936. Microsoft Windows bundled Dvorak in year 1995. Mac did in Mac OS 8 in year 1998. For more info, see Dvorak Keyboard Layout

Programmer Dvorak (~2001)

[see Dvorak vs Programer's Dvorak]

Colemak (2005)

Colemak layout (home page https://colemak.com/) appeared in 2005, designed by Shai Coleman. It is the one that popularized keyboard layout design craze, with its website hosting a discussion forum. Colemak is designed for easy transition from QWERTY. 17 keys are different from QWERTY. Colemak is aggressively marketed. Colemak layout is now in Linux and also in Mac OS X 10.7 (released on 2011-07-20).

Before Colemak, people who want QWERTY alternative simply points to Dvorak, without question. But with Colemak, it shows that a layout equally efficient to Dvorak is still possible. Colemak's rise to fame is its claim of easy to switch from QWERTY, and keeping QWERTY's undo cut copy paste key shortcuts, and claims to be more efficient than Dvorak. [see Dvorak vs Colemak]

Colemak DH (2014)

Colemak DH (https://colemakmods.github.io/mod-dh/ ) appeared in 2014. It is a improvement on Colemak, fixing the problem of right hand index finger moving to much to the center to press H.

Workman (2010)

Workman layout [https://workmanlayout.org/ ] is a improvement of Colemak. It appeared in 2010. Created by OJ Bucao. He didn't like Dvorak, and complaints that there are too much index finger moving to center of home row in Colemak. See: Workman Keyboard Layout .

QFMLWY (2011)

Carpalx is website that studies efficiency of keyboard layouts. The site began in 2007. By its algorithm, it comes up with the Carpalx QFMLWY layout ( http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization ) , presumed to be the most efficient, according to how he calculates the score. See also Carpalx flaws: What is the Most Efficient Keyboard Layout?

Halmak (2016)

Halmak layout is designed by Nikolay Nemshilov. it's created by using an evolution algorithm to arrive at a optimal layout.

https://github.com/MadRabbit/halmak

Features list from their site:

• Build based on the real world hand movements analysis
• Nearly maximal possible typing efficiency
• Very low overall fingers movement distance
• Very low same finger / same hand usage overheads
• Very low overall horizontal hands movement
• Highly symmetrical design that accounts for individual fingers strength
• Designed with the modern, web based English in mind

Engram (2021)

Engram Layout is new around 2021-03, designed by Arno Klein. The layout is designed based ergonomic science, for typing English language, using Google's ngram (bigram, trigram) text data as part of the design basis.

• 2021-03-13 Engram home page: https://engram.dev/
• 2021-03-13 github [2021-03-13 https://github.com/binarybottle/engram ]
• Engram layout has a academic paper. [Engram: A Systematic Approach to Optimize Keyboard Layouts for Touch Typing, With Example for the English Language 2021-03-09 By Arno Klein. At https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202103.0287/v1 ]
• site you can practice engram layout. https://keymanweb.com/#en,Keyboard_engram

Abstract

Most computer keyboard layouts (mappings of characters to keys) do not reflect the ergonomics of the human hand, resulting in preventable repetitive strain injuries. We present a set of ergonomics principles relevant to touch typing, introduce a scoring model that encodes these principles, and outline a systematic approach for developing optimized keyboard layouts in any language based on this scoring model coupled with character-pair frequencies. We then create a keyboard layout optimized for touch typing in English by constraining key assignments to reduce lateral finger movements and enforce easy access to high-frequency letters and letter pairs, applying open source software to generate millions of layouts, and evaluating them based on Google’s N-gram data. We use two independent scoring methods to compare the resulting Engram layout against 10 other prominent keyboard layouts based on a variety of publicly available text sources. The Engram layout scores consistently higher than other keyboard layouts.

Asset (2006)

Asset is designed for easy transition from QWERTY. Designed by David Piepgrass in 2006. Home page at http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/

Norman Layout (2013)

Norman layout is very new, published in 2013. Norman layout is created by David Norman. It has a well designed homepage, at http://normanlayout.info/about

Norman layout is very similar to Asset Layout. Norman layout is published in 2013, and is the result of study of all existing layouts. Its main claim is that it “keeps 22/26 letters in the normal use pattern of their QWERTY finger”, and claims to be just as efficient as Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, etc.

Also, Norman layout, like many others, has a critical misconception, believing that the { X C V } keys are optimal for cut copy paste. In fact, these shortcuts get you Repetitive Strain Injury. [see Why Undo Cut Shortcut Keys Are Bad?]

Capewell (2005)

The Capewell layout is designed using a evolutionary algorithm to evolve the best possible layout. Capewell is designed by Michael Capewell. Released ~2005. Home page at http://www.michaelcapewell.com/projects/keyboard/

Minimak (2012)

Minimak layout ( http://www.minimak.org/ ) is created by Ted Lilley around 2012. Minimak is designed to be fastest to learn for QWERTY touch-typers. It only changes 4 keys, so that 2 of the most frequently used letters in English (e → 13%, t → 9%) are now on the home row, typed by the strong middle fingers. Minimak has other versions, with 8 keys change, then 12 keys change. The idea is that one can progressively adopt more efficient layout.

qwpr (2013)

qwpr is another one similar to {Colemak, Workman}, but it changes even less keys, and lets you type many European language characters and Unicode symbols.

qwpr is designed by Jameson Quinn. It appeared in 2013. Home page at http://sourceforge.net/p/qwpr/wiki/Home/

Arensito (2001)

The Arensito Keyboard Layout, by Håkon Hallingstad, year 2001. http://www.pvv.org/~hakonhal/main.cgi/keyboard

Major points according to the author:

• 8 most used characters in home row.
• Minimizes repeated same finger.
• Optimize diagraphs (common 2-letter sequence) and trigraphs.
• Minimizes use of pinkies.

Keeping Z X C V is Inefficient

Many layouts keep the {Z, X, C, V} keys in the same position as QWERTY, so that the {undo, cut, copy, paste} keys don't change. This is bad. This induces Repetitive Strain Injury. See: Why Undo Cut Shortcut Keys Are Bad?.

Thumb Keyboard Layouts

These are layouts designed for physical keyboard that has 4 or more thumb keys.

Thumb Keyboard Layouts

One-handed Dvorak Layouts

There are also a Dvorak layout for single left hand, and one for single right hand. see Dvorak keyboard layout

Ergonomic Layouts for Other Language

And there are also various ergonomic-oriented layouts (inspired from the Dvorak layout) for several other European languages.

• German Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts: de-ergo, NEO, ADNW
• French Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts: dvorak-fr, bepo, bvofrak
• Portuguese Ergonomic Keyboard Layout: pt-Nativo

there is also Turkish-F layout, which is ergonomic.

• 
  Turkish Keyboard Layout

What is the Most Efficient Keyboard Layout?

What is the Most Efficient Keyboard Layout?

A Ergonomic Layout Standard for All Languages

Another common problem is for non-English languages. For example, German, Spanish, French, and even Chinese and Japanese can benefit because many of their input methods use English alphabet.

[see Pinyin Letter Frequency 拼音字母頻率]

In these languages, usually there are few extra characters such as é that need to be typed. There are many standardized layouts for them (For example, QWERTZ, AZERTY), but often they still requires you to type the special chars by a combination of key press using AltGraph or Compose key, and these layout usually do not consider ergonomics of letter frequency.

• Idiocy of Keyboard Layouts: QWERTZ, AZERTY
• Alt Graph Key, Compose Key, Dead Key
• French Keyboard Layouts
• German Keyboard Layouts

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the following people who have made useful comments.

• Scott L Burson told me about Asset layout. [see http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/cef5fad77897af39]
• Hugues [see http://huguesaujapon.blogspot.com/] told me about Bépo layout. [see French Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts: dvorak-fr, bepo, bvofrak]
• Elena (egarr…@gmail.com) corrected a error in my Progrmmer's Dvorak layout.
• Xavier Gomes Pinho told me about pt-native layout. [see Portuguese Ergonomic Keyboard Layout: pt-Nativo]
• Roland Kaufmann [http://www.kaufmann.no/] made informative comment on the programer Dvorak layout and also about Dvorak on Linux.
• Hugues Dumez mentioned the bvofrak for French.