I switched my layout yesterday evening. I had to reflash a few times to get my intended LED settings working properly. It's only been a few hours, and my proficiency is a tiny fraction of what it was, but I can already say this: this layout feels very good. It's a huge improvement over my previous one.

To reply to your doubt, Steve, my new layout aims to address the single biggest issue in a majority of keyboards, that is, the extreme underuse of the thumbs. The thumbs are the most dextrous and nimble fingers; thus, they should take on the heaviest loads. It's a simple truth, yet I didn't understand the gravity of it until last year.

At the beginning of the year, I began creating my new layout. I had time to think about it since I wouldn't be able to switch until the summertime due to work. In February I asked about rolls on this forum. When Shai provided a link to the hand alternation page on the main Colemak site (https://colemak.com/Hand_alternation), I was reacquainted with Arensito, a layout I had come across but had long since forgotten, by a quote that caught my eye: "I finally wanted to maximize the probability of having two consecutive keystrokes happen next to each other. This keeps the fingers rolling and increases the typing speed (Dvorak was wrong!)." I totally agreed and checked out the source.

To my amazement, the designer of Arensito had to the same conclusion I had, namely, that the thumbs can be better utilized by moving keys up a row and assigning the newly freed keys to the thumbs. That was in 2001(!). He (Håkon Hallingstad, the designer of Arensito) gave his thumb access to five (5) additional keys by doing this. He mentions that Kinesis gives each thumb six (6) keys and Maltron, the layout from which Evotron, my own layout, derives half its name, eight (8). Though, he doubts whether they can be effectively accessed.

At around this time, I began looking at new developments in QMK. I also looked at other layouts for inspiration. I remembered there was this one guy, Gergely Nagy, AKA algernon, an exceptional programmer who developed the tap dance feature for QMK, who, last time I had checked, was working on making his own layout. In truth, his layouts were never really that good, but I was curious, and, with his skill, anything's possible. As it turns out, he hadn't done much work in that area, but he had contributed to a handful of keyboards, one of which, Dygma, caught my eye.

Dygma, a company I'd never heard of, made a keyboard with an 8-bar. A video called "The Key to Keyboard Ergonomics - the thumbs ? ?" does a great job explaining their philosophy, and mine as well. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7JVvFa330g It has a lot of great ideas. The problem is that it's an 8-bar. That is, each thumb gets four (4) additional keys. It's not enough. My old version of Evotron had a "24-bar". My new one has a "20-bar". And that's at a minimum because I'm not chording layers or keys.

V, B, W, Tab, Backspace, Enter, Delete, D, C, and Escape all belong to the left thumb. My old version had more thumb keys, but they were mostly macro keys. Now, with just 10 for each thumb, they are all easily accessible. Likewise, Z, J, X, Q, K, Space, Hyphen, and three (3) macro keys all belong to the right thumb. Also, the pinkies' home row is one row lower than the home row for the other fingers.

There's a lot more I could say, but I think that's good for now. Typing on this thing is really time consuming. It'll be a long while till I'm comfortable. The potential is there; I can tell it's amazing, but it needs time.

I updated my layout. The previous version grouped T, M, P, and G together, which was a mistake because the M-P bigram is common in English and Castilian. I then decided to switch the D to the M, the M to the P, the P to the C, and the C to the D, a simple rotation. Then I considered what Steve had said about low-frequency letters, so I tried putting the N as the main left thumb key. It's a super interesting idea, but a little too crazy methinks, at least for now.

Initially, I chose C and B because I wanted to deviate as little as possible from Colemak while still improving it. Then I came under the impression that the only way to pull off letters and extensive thumb keys was to use low-frequency letters, or at least letters that don't change things too drastically, which, in my mind, meant low-frequency, as in not high-frequency. I think that's what had been preventing me from finding the simple solution.

So I tried another common home row key, S, which worked perfectly. It's very Colemak-y, facilitating the migration. I also moved the thumb letters to keys that are easier to reach. These changes improved my layout greatly. I also changed some things in the layers and trimmed the main layout. I feel like the layout has improved massively in the last couple of days.

I still feel that low-frequency letters are the way to go with the right thumb key since the space bar prevents any high-frequency key from getting near it due to inevitable bigram conflicts. At least, that's what I think. I haven't even investigated whether there are high-frequency keys that don't happen at the beginning or end of a word.

Here is a link to the layout: https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez/lay … P/latest/0

A pic on imgur: https://i.imgur.com/KqD4HS4.jpg

I've also attached it.