I did wonder about minus/hypen shortly after I did that update. But then I figured I might also want e.g. plus, equals and brackets too, especially if you wanted to analyse, for example, computer code. But on the other hand there's a need to not get out of hand with characters are included, as although it's not a big deal when considering single characters, for bigrams there are n² possibilities, which makes the needed bigram data file grow rapidly.

So... I've had a bit of a brainwave regarding which characters to support...

Up until the now, the analyzer has been limited to a limited subset of characters, basically the ones usually found in the main text area. This was done because most alternative layouts tend to only move those keys, and including a lot of characters would have made bigram calculations unwieldy.

But... what occurred to me was, there is no fundamental reason why I can't use any arbitrary characters for the letter frequency analysis part, and only use the limited set of characters for consideration of bigrams. This would effectively allow any input layout in - including whatever numbers and symbols you wanted, and the analyser would work! The only limitation would be that you wouldn't get bigram penalties for unusual combinations, e.g. "1q", but I don't consider that to a big deal.

So, I had some fun implementing this over the weekend. For completeness I have added hypen/minus to the list as you suggested, so there are now 35 characters supported in the bigram analysis. But you can also now have *any* character in the layout itself, including the number row if you so desire.

I also added a heatmap feature too which I think is quite nice, albeit not as pretty as patorjk's.

The new frequency results show most of the extra characters are hardly used - the numbers etc have very low frequency - but I guess you'd expect that as the source material is books. I am planning to some frequency analysis of text from other sources for comparison.

Example input:

1! 2" 3£ 4$ 5% 6^ 7& 8* 9( 0) -_ =+
q w f p b j l u y ;: [{ ]} 
a r s t g k n e i o '@
z x c d v m h ,< .> /?

effort:
5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 
3.5 2.4 2.0 2.2 3.4 3.8 2.2 2.0 2.4 3.5 5.0 5.0 
1.5 1.2 1.0 1.0 2.9 2.9 1.0 1.0 1.2 1.5 4.0
3.5 2.8 2.5 1.7 2.6 2.6 1.7 2.5 2.8 3.5
penalties:
2.5 2.5 3.5 #same-finger
0.5 1.0 1.5 #pinky-ring
0.1 0.2 0.3 #ring-middle
fingers:
0 1 2 3 3 6 6 7 8 9 9 9
0 1 2 3 3 6 6 7 8 9 9 9
0 1 2 3 3 6 6 7 8 9 9
0 1 2 3 3 6 6 7 8 9
type:
angle

I don't to any preprocessing of the input, but it seems those characters are not present in the source texts anyway.