tldr: it depends on your preferences.

THE PERFECT keyboard layout does not exist, not even in principle, because different people care about different things. Users of the workman layout presumably like workman's effort model, users of colemak might like the left-hand Ctrl- shortcuts among other things.  It doesn't make sense to ask for a best layout except in the context of one's preferences.

Some possibilities to consider are:

1. Important: your touchtyping technique.  For example, those who type Colemak C with the index, rather than middle, finger incur an extra 0.18% same-finger.  Though the resulting 1.90% is still better than, say, workman or dvorak, a layout designed with that touchtyping technique in mind might avoid that penalty altogether.

2. The usual metrics (same-finger, distance, etc)

3. Having a rare key at QWERTY Y

4. Having a rare key at the upper-row pinkies

5. Which shortcuts you care about, and to what extent

6. To what extent you want punctuation to be moved

7. To what extent you consider QWERTY WE/IO to be "almost home row"

8. To what extent you're comfortable with nonstandard positions (e.g. putting Z/Q on QWERTY 2/3 or way on the right side?)

9. Whether or not you want a "wide" layout (right-hand home row shifted to the right by one)

10. Are there any "bad key sequences" you wish to avoid (probably the most infamous being Dvorak's "ls", aka QWERTY P;)

After establishing and prioritizing your criteria, you can:

1. See if anyone else has made a layout satisfying them.  The problem with this is that there are so many possible criteria that it's unlikely anyone else would've optimized their layout for the same.  Still, who knows - someone may have gotten close.  A good starting point might be patjork's keyboard layout analyzer, which has a large list of user-submitted layouts and acts as a decent analyzer on top of that.

2. Try to make your own layout, either manually and/or by plugging in as many criteria as possible into an optimizer like CarpalX or MTGAP.

If you are happy to keep the letters on the standard keyboard within the same area as on Qwerty (as in just swapping some letter placements), then simply your desired layout could well be 1 layout amongst 26 factorial character distributions minus 1. That doesn't consider punctuation, cursor movement, deletions, capitilasations etc.  Try each of them out for a few weeks at a time and see how you get on ;)

You could whittle that list down, by seeding the home row with the most frequently occuring english letters.  That's 10 possible placements.  10 factorial = 3,628,800 permutations on the home row alone.  But it may just be that having the most frequently occuring letters on the home row isn't such a great idea anyway, but perhaps it is!

The above is really to illustrate how many possible layouts are out there.  (Of course there isn't enough time in the world to try them all out!)  But perhaps you could use a computer to brute force the problem.  Or pare down the possibilities by coming up with some rulesets - like put K on a not so good placement.  Don't put T and H on the same finger, favour less finger travel etc.

Given a sensible ruleset it would be great to try and solve the problem.  Perhaps with a generic/average cross language corpus (too idealistic?).

I like the idea of personalised layouts, but a one for all would be quite nice.  It's difficult to know up front what you want or even measure what you are already good at.  Which are your quickest most comfortable fingers?  Do you like hand alternation? Etc.

I remember at school my maths teacher telling me that you could calcualate Pi by way of probabilities of pins dropping and landing in a circle.   See: Buffon's needle/Monte Carlo method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon%27s_needle.  http://www.eveandersson.com/pi/monte-carlo-circle .

Could you somehow use an organic analogy to help you optimise the layout?  Slime Mould can be used for transport network design: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/ … ort-routes

Or given enough monkeys with enough computers and different layouts could you crack the problem?

I'm not saying that any of those ideas are the way to devise the optimal layout, rather an alternative way of looking at the problem could be of help.  Filter that 26! -1 list to 1!

Dvorak splitting the vowels onto the left hand I think is quite inspirational.  It  helps narrow the field of the problem, and has the added bonus of introducing good hand alternation (my guess is that he figured that putting the vowels on the left helped alternation that helped reduce typewriter jams).  Dvorak favours the home row (is that a good idea?).

If you consider the number row as a possible placement for letters, or locating a character in two different placements, or introducing or moving modifiers, or changing the physical layout of the keyboard; it only complicates the problem further.  It's hard to measure Maltron against Qwerty because the physical layout is different.

The seek for perfection is just the outside appearance of inner insecurity. Once you feel good about yourself, you will not be overdemanding as such.

99% people in the world happily use Qwerty. 1% people like us use advanced, optimized layout and still unhappily seek a perfect one.

Hey all thank you so much for the replies. Still trying to decipher what pinkyache said XD

Anyway, what about you guys? Do you guys personally think any layout is better than Colemak (user base and convenience aside?). If enough knowledgeable people give me a consensus on what they objectively think is better than Colemak I'd be more than happy to use that..

I know very well that the perfect layout is impossible (because of how subjective it is) but I'm just looking for the layout that makes the most amount of sense on paper at least.