XKB half-QWERTY

An annotated half-QWERTY keyboard layout for the X Keyboard Extension

About half-QWERTY

Half-QWERTY is a touch typing technique for one-handed touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard. It has a very gradual learning curve because it leverages the symmetry of the human hands: right hand finger movements are mirrored on the left hand and vice versa.

Some older phones have a keyboard marketed as half-QWERTY where two characters, for example Q and W, share the same key. That's obviously not what we're talking about here.

The technique is decades old and several hard- and software solutions exists today. Edgar Matias pioneered the concept and his research paper on half-QWERTY is an excellent source for further reading on the matter.

Software solutions for Linux

Linux desktop systems use the highly configurable X Keyboard Extension, or XKB, which can be used to create a half-QWERTY layout. A well-known half-QWERTY configuration for XKB is mirrorboard created by XKCDs Randall Munroe. The configuration in this repository has some advantages over mirrorboard:

• the configuration is abundantly annotated
• it contains a base layout that isn't biased towards a specific "flip" modifier and can be cleanly extended
• it contains a "caps" variant that turns caps-lock into a "flip" modifier intended for occasional one-hand typing, similar to mirrorboard
• it contains a "space" variant that optimizes tab and caps-lock for using the space bar as flip modifier
• works well when plugging in and out keyboards of different models
• can be made available to the keyboard settings of your desktop environment
• tries to be just as friendly to the right hand as it is to the left hand
• tries to mirror as much keys as spatially possible

A noteworthy alternative to handling this in XKB is XHK: Xlib HalfKeyboard. It does the job very well and uses the space bar as a flip switch but it operates on a lower level which makes it less configurable by design.

Other software solutions for Linux exist but all seem incomplete, outdated or simply a bad idea.

Using the XKB layout

This file is just a front cover, the actual README is the configuration itself. Start reading it! Some tech-savviness is required, but you're still here so I guess that's not a problem.

Feedback

Found a bug? Have a better idea? I'd love to hear about it!

Joris Steyn, joris -at- j0r1s.nl