Difference to Colemak.

T works better on right hand because distance to Shift key is less. And Th very common start to sentences.
For same reason, having A and I on right hand. (in "words" version).

Most frequent capitals in English: T A I S C E D M N R P O B

Cheers, Ian

I didn't know there was another way on ANSI. :-)
Apparently the previous speed typing champ only uses Caps Lock.

We only get ANSI keyboards here, no ISO on sale is shops. And if there were. they would be UK version with symbols in the wrong place :-)

Philipp Kiefer took my Uciea layout and applied some MiniMotion tweaks, which put the shifts on the index finger bottom row. I wasn't wild about that so I tweaked it further. This is current best layout on KLAnext, for ANSI, but it won't be everyone's cup of tea...

Cheers, Ian

Not many, it seems! It's a common topic in Colemak and Monkeytype Discord channels, and my impression is that few do the alternate-shift thing – at least, not consistently.

That's hardly a matter of opinion? The left shift key on ISO is 1u down, 1.5u left from the centre of the QWERTY/Colemak A key. Correspondingly, the right shift key is exactly the same distance from the Colemak O (QWERTY semicolon) position. If you calculate distances to the center of the shift keys, I think you're doing it wrong. Unless you have some kind of proof that most typists hit the center of their Shift keys, which I patently do not. I hit the Shift keys like other 1u keys, at the minimal stretch, and it doesn't make sense to me to do otherwise. Of course, the keys being so wide there is some leeway at high speed I guess but in general I use the short stretch.

Calculating to the center of the Shift keys doesn't even work, in fact. On my laptop, the left Shift key is 1.25u and the right Shift key 3u. On other boards, the widths vary greatly, between 2.75u and 1.25u wide RShifts. So that kind of measure would be very very wrong to use. I don't think any wise typist would hit the 2.75u right Shift key exactly on the middle...

https://deskthority.net/wiki/Shift_key

:-) ... and I took it out of mine (along with Exponential Distance) ... it benefitted "wide" / right-shift layouts without achieving the intended aim of trying to punish sub-optimal placement of high-use keys. I feel the various "wide" layouts are fixing the wrong problem ... ANSI / ISO sucks, get ortholinear style... :-).

It would be nice if the Chinese started churning out affordable boards, even if they are membrane switches ... just to get people onto a better form factor. </rant>

Since then I've categorised ANSI layouts into "conventional" and "unconventional" where "conventional" implies that these (at least) are as per US ANSI:

1. home keys
2. key-finger assignments (as per touch-type accepted theory)
3. space key
4. enter key
5. both shift keys
6. AltGr

I've also been having discussions with Phillipp about how to include some use of the backspace key, at say 5% or 10% (or x% where I have no idea what x is...), in which case I would need to add 7. Backspace to that list, at which point all the Colemak variants suddenly become "unconventional", which creates political rather than technical problems ... :-)

Maybe my implementation of Fitt's was wrong / too heavy, because it also had Den's other distance penalties as well.
So I will probably relook at it again in the future.

Cheers, Ian

Please never ever use Alice Ch. 1 as corpus, for anything...?

Alice may have used to be the go-to, but it really shouldn't be. But for this particular purpose I suppose it sufficed.  ￣(=⌒ᆺ⌒=)￣

When Wide layouts score better because of a smaller Shift and Enter travel, that indicates that their arrangement is indeed better, which coincides with my opinion of them as a Wide (CAWS) user. So that's definitely part of the game! However, it's unfair and quite uncertain to compare Wide and non-Wide layouts on these analyzers. Punctuation placement, Wide/Angle and similar mods are things I much prefer to keep modular so you can add them as you please without changing the main layout's properties much.

I lost track of what we're trying prove here, but the conclusion of iandoug's experiments seems to be that the Wide Mod is an excellent mod from the analyzers' point of view. But you can apply the Wide Mod to most layouts, so if we are trying to access how good a mod it is, wouldn't we compare Colemak Std vs Colemak Wide, Colemak-DH Std vs Colemak-DH Wide, etc? For layout comparisons, I also think it's better to compare using all ANSI or all ISO, not mix and match, otherwise the change form factor affects the results. My analyzer does have both ISO and ANSI versions of Colemak-DH BTW.

And of course, I can't help but mention an extra thing that makes a huge difference in practice but is unaccounted for in the analyzers: the Extend Layer!

The big question with that is whether to keep the symbol keys away or not. The semicolon is already messed up in the letter block, so for simple analysis I just use that as the "extra symbol" even with layouts that put something more useful in that spot (like apostrophe). Just to keep analysis to the letter block only, as it were.

However, more optimized layouts tend to move symbol keys anyway, and then the bets are off aren't they? For instance, the E-comma SFB on Colemak makes some modders swap comma and slash. Analyzers have mixed opinions on the end result of that, but it does wonders for the SFB stat at least.

So if we can move symbol keys, then the Wide mod will be a part of that. You could optimize a layout differently for a Wide configuration than for a non-Wide one.

My basic philosophy is, like it seems you want to do, to look at the main letter block separately from symbol mods and geometric mods like Wide. So in a simple world, I think I agree with your approach. But it will fail to pick up on some things like the effect of symbol-optimized layouts. MTGAP is such a layout. People say it's better because it scores highly in analysis; I don't know much about its merits but it does change not only symbol key positions but layer mappings. What an analyzer makes of that is a good question!