Just wonderirg if anyone has analyzed whether swapping the N and R keys improves the Colemak layout (for English, anyway, with its common ER/RE bigram).
In a somewhat related question, what software is being used on this forum to analyse and compare layouts (then, I wouldn't need to ask here :-) ?
Do the NE/EN bigrams are less common? Combinations of N and R with all vowels are pretty common as I see. This is pretty much symmetric swap.
My opinion for this is: leave well enough alone.Mod DH does not change fingers for letters and so essentially it has the same fingering as in Colemak. You personal modification with V in the top row follows the same rule. But what you propose now can not be called Colemak in my opinion.
Sounds like THR would be rather awkward with this mod? And I don't see how it'd improve anything much, really.
Then again, my ring fingers may be stronger than some people's. They're quite dependent, but that doesn't affect their home position key significantly I think.
In terms of the Colemak design goals, it loses a few points by swapping keys between hands. Colemak only has one such swap (E-P) because Shai found them more confusing.
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According to my analyser, swapping R and N doesn't make a lot of difference, but doesn't improve anything either. Score (lower is better) goes from 1.63526 (Mod-DH) to 1.64203 (Mod-DH with N/R swap).
With the modified layout, the most common new bigram identified is actually WN.
N is more frequent than R, so you'd probably want to keep N on the stronger finger. And keeping N on the same finger as Qwerty is probably a good thing as far as ease-of-learning goes. And as DreymaR says, better not to have letters swap sides unless really necessary.
Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.
Thank you all for your thoughts.
I posed the question because while most R/N letter combinations from the home row position appeared to be a wash, the ER/RE bigram for English words is significantly more common than EN/NE. Trying the swap, it was difficult to determine its effectiveness or not, due to finger memory.. A good reason to leave well enough alone! It did seem to produce some rhythmic rolls with the R vowel combinations though. In the little usage I tried, the right hand seem to benefit, the left less so.
Thank you Steve99 for the link to your analyser.. It may get me into trouble!!
