I'm not saying yours is wrong! There may be individual differences, ways to skin a cat. This is what I happen to like though.

I'm just enjoying our conversation. ;-)

Turns out I didn't have a very entrenched number key finger scheme when I started thinking about this, so I was free to choose.

Doesn't that sound familiar. Most of my later mods have also been geared towards finding a solution to the lack of thumbkeys. Having a 9 key home row when you could have a 10 key home row is ludicrous. Second goal, find something that works on ANSI. As the layout with the fewest keys, it is the lowest common denominator when fiddling with design. Width comes in at a distant third.

The best solutions I have found are: (will add pictures... eventually)
-The Inversion Mod
-The MK Type
-Makeshift split keyboard using a Logitech G13 for the left hand.
-A Microsoft Sculpt Comfort.
-A JIS Keyboard. (Japanese Thumbshift)
-An Ergodox.

The Microsoft Sculpt comfort is the only keyboard that I am aware of that has a split spacebar with seperate scancodes. Even that is only when one of them is set in backspace mode, so you'd have to remap both L.Space and Backspace together. All other keyboards with a split spacebar use the same scancode for both halves.

The JIS keyboards are somewhat hard to find outside of Japan. Still easier and cheaper than obtaining or assembling an Ergodox.

As for your current proposal... well, the apostrophe placement is terrible. I'm not quite sure you realize just how bad it is. On the other hand, you don't have much space to play around in. I think your best bet would be to rely on your wordprocessor's autocorrect or automatic text replacement to add apostrophes when needed. (not sure what to do about 's though)

That aside, not much to say that hasn't been said about the ThumbsPlus or the Curl Mod separately. Though for what it is worth, on the ThumbsPlus - while Space on R.Alt is less comfortable - I put Shift on Space to reduce redundancy. The space key is easily accessible to either hand, so we can cut out the L.Shift as well as the R.Shift, and put something more useful in it's place. Like apostrophe for instance. Granted, with Dremar's Extend layer, most of the useful keys are already there, but on an ANSI you can actually pull off the Angle Mod without killing L.Pinkie.

Ooooh. I didn't know about that new Matias. Thanks for the info. It looks awesome, like a better version of the Kinesis Freestyle, and not quite as good as an Ergodox. Still, I see no mention of separate scancodes for the space keys. Link please.

R.Alt as MonoShift will cause all kinds of problems. Mostly for applications that expect Mouse+Shift /Ctrl /Ctrl+Shift. Also seems to make shifting the unmodded 6789 positions very awkward, though that is a rather minor concern.

EDIT: Though, with the Extended layer, you'd still have access to shift on the left, wouldn't you? Hmm....

On the other hand, not all applications play nice with PKL, and the Extended layer can't be applied through the registry.

Still PKL can just be toggled on or off as needed.

Hmmmm...

SteveP: If you haven't already, check out my proposed NumPad Extend layer, in my main Big Bag sig topic. I'm working on implementing it well (currently it's only done for XKB and lacks a dedicated modifier but I think I know how to make one).

// KeyPad overlay with nav block to the left (lv7-8):
// +------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
// |` €€€ |1     |2     |3     |4 £   |5 €   |6     |7     |8     |9     |0     |-     |=     |
// | Del  |  !   |  @   |  #   |  $   |  %   |  ^   | KP_7 | KP_8 | KP_9 | KP_* | KP_- | KP_= |
// +------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
// |Tab   |Q ### |W ### |F ### |P €€€ |G €€€ |J ### |L     |U     |Y     |;     |[ {   |] }   |
// |      | Home | Up   | End  | Del  | Esc  | PgUp | KP_4 | KP_5 | KP_6 | KP_+ |  (   |  )   |
// +------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
// |Caps+ |A ### |R ### |S ### |T €€€ |D     |H ### |N     |E     |I     |O     |' "   |\ |   |
// | ++++ | Left | Down | Right| Back | K_Bgn| PgDn | KP_1 | KP_2 | KP_3 | K_Ent|  '   |  \   |
// +------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
// |_ *** |Z €€€ |X === |C === |V === |B *** |K     |M     |, ;   |. :   |/     |Spc   |Entr  |
// | *MOn | Undo | Cut  | Copy | Paste| *Bt1 | K_Lck| KP_0 |  ,   | KP_. | KP_/ | Spc  | K_Ent|
// +------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+

When I get it to work, at least in PKL it'll probably be activated with Alt+Extend but holding Extend alone will maintain it – and there'll be a lock key combo too (for instance Shift+Alt+Extend to lock the Num layer on/off).

Seems we're mostly on the same page as far as the NumPad block itself is concerned. Nice. Concerning all the other minor mapppings, the problem is to make them really easy to remember. I ended up keeping the left-hand number row for such symbols as $ % etc, simply because putting them in more easily reachable positions didn't seem worth the effort of learning those positions! But I see you're working from the known too, so your way should work well.

It doesn't matter much to me whether you select this layer by AltGr or another modifier; it's still a mapping layer. In Linux, it's my Extend+AltGr layer, but that should change to something more workable. So far I haven't really felt the need for this layer so it's not at the top of my TODO list.

I moved the nav block to the left hand for the NumPad layer, as navigation is still necessary for number entry and a left-hand nav block is almost as easy to use as the main one due to the intuitive layout of the nav keys and the workings of our wonderful brains. As it stands, I haven't got a coding layer as I didn't feel I could implement it in a simple enough way to make it worthwhile (and I'm not sacrificing my AltGr mappings – I need those and my dead keys need to be in better places than yours!).

That's a decent point about the '10'-bigrams. My little dilemma is that in Norway and some other countries we use a decimal comma instead of a decimal point – commas also crop up in other NumPad-related contexts of course – so I need both the comma and period in place. Therefore I'll accept that same-finger bigram. I don't feel that it'll hurt me much.

Indeed, thumb keys are useful! I'm still dedicated to implementations that'll work on my current and future laptops though. ;-)

Hmm, interesting, having comma-semicolon and fullstop-colon keys does have a certain logic to it.
Not sure I'd be keen on the top-row enter position though. Anyway, I've become too accustomed to the DreymaR-style Extend-Space (which I find to be very nice) to consider changing enter now.

For those who don't mind moving punctuation around, maybe this?

J  L  U  Y  '
H  N  E  I  O enter
K  M  ,; .: shift

Where would you put  <> though?

Ah, then it seems I didn't understand what you were talking about.
Is this proposal to use a numpad as the right hand home position?

Oh, do pipe down Piotr! Half the time your writing skills aren't exactly what I'd describe as the most illuminating. You can seem positively opaque, maybe it's a language barrière and maybe it's just your style but try to be polite and humble because god knows you should.

And for what it's worth, I didn't immediately remember which part of this 4-page, fairly complex topic you referred to either. Cevgar's a fount of ideas, so there's plenty to take from where he's been. So I dare say steve's in good company here.

There, said it. ;-)