hi, long time keyboardist first time poster,
been through a lot of different layouts. qwerty, dvorak, qwerty, colemak, qwerty, norman. going to give colemak a try again with the dh mods.
i was wondering if anyone has considered any benefits to swapping i and o. probably minimal but just curiosity.
Why exactly would you want to do it? They have almost the same frequency so no real gains there.
At the very least, you'd have to consider the same-finger bigrams we have to concede:
Colemak: YI/IY
Your mod: OY/YO
The others are punctuation bigrams; I guess there's probably no big difference in those.
Do yourself a favour and leave Norman by the wayside. By most measures it's quite inferior and its main raison d'être has been obviated by Colemak-Curl(DH).
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Your mod: OY/YO
The common word YOU is bad enough in Colemak as it is, this change would make it worse! Definite no-no.
Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.
Another thing: Swapping I and O! The most common complaint of Colemak learners is about R "castling" with S. Switching the R/S pair from S-R to R-S inwards in Colemak from QWERTY, annoys people's minds a lot and we oldies spend much time trying to explain to the newbies why this has to be so with R and S. So you'd better have a really good reason for wanting to swap I/O as well!
Well, do you? ;-)
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
Another thing: Swapping I and O! The most common complaint of Colemak learners is about R "castling" with S. Switching the R/S pair from S-R to R-S inwards in Colemak from QWERTY, annoys people's minds a lot and we oldies spend much time trying to explain to the newbies why this has to be so with R and S. So you'd better have a really good reason for wanting to swap I/O as well!
Well, do you? ;-)
To be fair, Colemak moves both I and O rightward, so swapping Colemak I and O would leave O on the same finger as Qwerty. Presumably that's the motivation for OP's suggestion. Workman has O on the ring finger and I on the pinky also. But I think this is neither justified nor wise. O and I are similar in frequency, but crucially O has common bigrams with pretty much all other letters, whereas I has a number of fairly safe same-finger partners such as Y or U.
One of the great design decisions in Colemak was to put O on the right pinky. It's really the perfect place for it!
Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.
yeah, i guess more of my curiosity is why oi positions are so great.
Not all positions in Colemak are so great! The idea is to build a whole that allows good typing. Sure, O and I have to have good positions since they're common letters. Some argue that Colemak A and O may not be good enough for people with weak or stressed pinkies, but I find it pleasant enough. The ring fingers are stronger but less independent, so I guess those positions are inherently better for more frequent letters that nevertheless don't get into many same-finger bigrams? But this is fairly conjectural.
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
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