An ergonomic keyboard layout.
TL;DR: Here is the layout.
My name is Philippe Daouadi. I am a French developer, and I like typing comfortably.
I started learning touch typing (typing without looking at the keyboard) around 10 years ago with the French AZERTY layout. Some time later, I discovered that a lot of better keyboard layouts existed. At the time I used to type a lot of French, so after some thinking and a lot of motivation, I decided on learning the BÉPO layout which is a kind of French Dvorak.
While I was interested in layouts, I got interested in keyboards too. My first ergonomic keyboard was a TypeMatrix. I kept using that BÉPO+TypeMatrix configuration for maybe 7 years.
My only regret with TypeMatrix was that they didn't make mechanical keyboards. I had a look at the Truly Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard but really disliked the key positioning.
But recently, a coworker bought an Ergodox EZ, he kindly let me try it, and that's when I fell in love with it!
After having bought my new keyboard, I thought to myself that since French is not the language I type the most anymore, and since I need to learn to use a new keyboard anyway, I might as well learn a new layout.
I did some research and concluded that the candidates were:
- Dvorak
- Colemak
- Workman
- the carpalx layouts
The last one is actually more interesting than the others. The carpalx layouts are machine-generated layouts.
This article convinced me to try out a carpalx layout, and so I switched to the QGMLWB layout.
The carpalx project is not a keyboard layout. It is a small Perl program that, according to a typing model, tries to find the most optimized layout for a given word set.
Carlpax gave birth to three main layouts:
- QFMLWY
- QGMLWB
- QGMLWY
After about an hour testing and learning QGMLWB, the most optimized one, I realised that maybe we could do better.
Carpalx starts optimizing from the QWERTY layout and doesn't try to optimize symbols placement. This means that all symbols that are at the bottom right of the keyboard are stuck there, even though they are rarely used keys occupying easily accessible spots. The QGMLWB layout tries to help with that by swapping the 'P' and ';' keys.
Moreover, looking into the carpalx code, I noticed that the typing model assumed the keyboard was standard, with keys disposed in diagonal, as opposed to ergonomic keyboards where keys are disposed as a matrix (as vertical colums).
It was time to create a new layout!
So I started with the carpalx project, and I first changed the model to adapt to matricial keyboards. The means that typing a 'T' or a 'Y' on a QWERTY keyboard takes the same effort, as the keys are at the same distance from the home row.
Next come the symbols. They are harder to optimize than the letters. We could optimize them in the same way as the letters but as I am a developper, the English language is not representative of what I type. And no programing language really is because I regularly use quite a few of them.
I made a compromise here and used carpalx to optimize only '.' and ',' because they occupy easy to access spots and I was sure that some letters would benefit more from these spots. I also moved ';' on 'P' position, as did the QGMLWB layout.
I didn't try to optimize characters as '[' and ']' as it would not make much sense in English. Also they already are in difficult spots so it's better to keep them there, as to ease transition from other layouts.
Thanks to these relaxed constraints ('.' and ',' can move) and a different effort model (e.g. 'T' and 'Y' have the same typing effort), carpalx was able to find a better layout than the previous best QGMLWB.
The new layout that came out is actually very similar to carpalx layouts. I named it ".ZCP" (I pronounce it dot-zi-ci-pi, if it's of any matter). The name comes from the third line of the layout because the first line starts exactly like one of the carpalx original layouts and because I find this name much easier to remember.
The features of this layout are:
- it's optimized for English typing with matricial keyboards (but is still pretty good for standard layouts)
- basic punctuation is optimized too
- it's a direct remap of QWERTY (like other English layouts)
Here is the layout:
According to the modified typing model, the different keyboards give the following effort scores:
| Layout | Effort |
|---|---|
| .zcp | 1.656 |
| qgmlwb | 1.664 |
| colemak | 1.834 |
| workman | 1.991 |
| dvorak | 2.096 |
| qwerty | 3.007 |
The X11 layout is in this repository.
Load it with:
setxkbmap dot-zcp -print | xkbcomp -Ix11 - $DISPLAY
# or
setxkbmap dot-zcp -variant fr -print | xkbcomp -Ix11 - $DISPLAY
All this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.