The Asset layout (D. Piepgrass, 2006):
|Q|W|J|F|G| |Y|P|U|L|;|
|A|S|E|T|D| |H|N|I|O|R|'|
|Z|X|C|V|B| |K|M|,|.|/|
http://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/
This guy has worked from the Colemak, obviously; his page is an interesting read by the way. He admits to higher 1-hand and 1-finger digraph frequencies than the Colemak (how much higher he doesn't say). However:
- I rather like keeping the S key in place for several reasons.
- Optically, keeping the E in its Dvorak position (which also means no hand switching from QWERTY) looks nice.
- He claims better right-hand use by moving the R key. The necessity of that in these mouse-using times is open to debate of course.
I'm sceptical to his top row though:
- The J position is too good.
- The Y position looks wrong somehow. I think that keeping the old Y position is stretching it too far? It's a rare enough letter, but there are some important digraphs to consider.
In sum, looks to me as if he may have some decent home row ideas but the Colemak top row looks better to me.
Any other thoughts on this? I guess that the biggie is whether the home row changes screw up any statistics majorly. I think that the ringfinger is strong enough for the S key for instance (as mentioned before, I believe the ring fingers are really quite strong in their home positions - just horrible when stretching)? But what would happen to other important measures?
|Q|W|F|P|G| |J|L|U|Y|;|
|A|S|E|T|D| |H|N|I|O|R|'|
|Z|X|C|V|B| |K|M|,|.|/|
;)
[Edit: And here I find another interesting page: http://qism.blogspot.com/2006/11/asset-vs-colemak.html
Of course you guys will have duked it out extensively already. That page was instructive. I'd still like to hear your comments to the question of the S, E and R keys! I'm sure a lot has been said about this by you earlier, but I couldn't find much.]
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***