colemax

several steps removed from the Colemak Mod-DH layout with the Colemak CF key swap, a simple incremental optimization can be achieved with the..

pg swap

The PG key swap is arguably a wash as their letter frequencies are similar, so much will depend one’s personal corpus. The change itself is surprisingly easy to adapt to—which may be an indicator of its benefit.

The common ING trigram noticeably benefited this change immediately.

colemax

however, for the ultimate optimization (according to the keyboard analysis tool), further improvements can be squeezed out with an index finger PB and MK swap..

These gains are purely dependent on the analyser in question which favours the diagonal index finger reach versus the lateral extension. In use feel will determine whether the gains are significant enough to warrant retaining.

The left hand key swap felt immediately better and easier to adapt to, due to the number of incremental layout changes to that hand, whereas, the right hand has been fixed for some time, hence, needing to overcome more entrenched finger memory. The M bigrams, however, should ultimately benefit this change to the right hand.

qwerty to colemax

the whole sale deviation (arrow legend) from the original Colemak layout now stands at..

The most significant changes are limited to key swaps of the middle and index finger keys, locating the higher frequency keys in the more optimal position of those fingers without affecting the finger assignment. Hence, effectively retaining existing finger rolls—making the transition all the easier to learn.

The most radical change is the abandonment of the Colemak QWERTY retention of the ZXCV cluster on the bottom row. Even then, this is more than made up for with the dedicated home row layer—gains all around..

Keyboard layout analysis metrics..

layout	finger effort
QWERTY	2.37558
Colemak	1.72559
Colemak Mod-DH	1.63633
ColemaX	1.62284

are not necessarily indicative of the superiority of one layout over another—especially if the design criteria are dissimilar e.g. finger rolls (Colemak) versus alternating hands (Dvorak). Even then, ultimately, the final word lies in the actual usage of the keyboard.