Gallium is a keyboard layout and takes inspiration from nerps and tries to improve on it in comfort and speed. Now on Monkeytype!
Angle Mod version of Gallium:
Windows, Mac and Linux are supported with their own packages. (Windows package made by CTGAP, Mac package made by Dainternetdude and Linux XKB file made by GalileoBlues.)
Gallium takes a focus on hand balance and lowering horizontal stretching of the index fingers, this is to try to enhance the comfort at higher speeds when it feels like one hand is fatiguing faster than the other and prematurely stops practice.
Gallium improves on Nerps by removing notable alt fingerings (using non-traditional fingers such as pressing P with middle finger and S with index on nerps). It also adopts a different vowel block that distributes the usage load between fingers more efficiently and lowers Same Finger Bigrams (SFBs).
Another way i personally believe Gallium enhances comfort is that it has balance between alternation of the hands when typing and rolling 2 or more letters in a row on the same hand, these are the metrics we associate with speed and the main movements in typing. in other layouts i have tried i found that hand patterns being repetitive can feel fatiguing mentally when rolling is maximised and alternation is lower overall. this can feel like typing almost a whole word on one hand.
Gallium also is the made in mind with maximising pinky usage according to the fastest typists, during my observations of 200 wpm typists a particular form adapted where the pinkies "float" and this has been hypothesised to give the typist more independance of the ring finger and lead to better comfort at higher speed, this form persists in Qwerty, Colemak, Canary and Semimak typists but only partially in Dvorak typists, in videos online of 200 wpm dvorak typists it was observed that only the left pinky floats whereas the right pinky does not, this is because dvorak's right pinky column is LSZ L being 4% usage on most corpora translates to a pinky that cannot stray too far away from the keyboard as it is needed way more often than other layouts on pinkies.
The threshold for this form to adapt seems to be 2% movement on the primary finger not on the homerow as demonstrated by the layout Semimak of which Semi and Fenno are both above 200 wpm and have adapted this form.
Based on these ideas Gallium tries to hit the maximum threshold that the pinkies can handle without giving up this possible advantage.
Gallium's performance in speed is dependant on a corpus of words just like every other alternative layout is, Gallium does particularly poorly at much more complex words such as Monkeytype's 450k wordlist setting but still does fine at 10k and below. the way it is worse is in SFBs as HY, PY, PH and PF bigrams occur much more commonly in that wordlist, one way to combat this is to alt finger them like spoken about previously.
Gallium was named after the element as are most of my layouts, I typically select a letter the bears importance to the design philosophy try to find a layout that starts with the same letter. G in this case marks the careful balance of the index inner column usage between both hands and how i was determined to get the usage very similar between the hands as i was frustated with layouts that blindly lowered the LSB stat in layout anaylsers (lateral stretch bigrams) without regard for where the locations of those bigrams are and the division of bad patterns like that.
Made by Smudge:
