I find that i type simi-lar s-equ-ences to-gether, with the micro-pauses as you like to call them in be-tween these s-equ-ences. Here mark-ed by dashes and spaces, mostly. As I gain familiar-ity with longer and longer s-equ-ences over time, I tend to minimise the a-mount of pauses. As such, I think the pauses' place-ment and leng-th depends purely on the typist in quest-ion.

I did not mean to suggest that colmak was over-focusing on any one thing.  I think colmak is the best layout I have ever seen and I appreciate all the hard work that went into it.  But I'm a 'tinkerer' and cant leave well enough alone.

It seems that the only micro-pause that would be a constant for every typist would be the space, enter, tab.  (I guess backspace would be a macro-pause.  LOL.)  But even these pauses aren't exactly consistent.  I just found a study that claims that the "time to prepare to type a word" depends on the length of the word.  Something about memory access time.  And that may even change depending on if you are typing from memory or copying from a page.

As far as implementing this idea into a layout, I suppose it may only apply to the comma and period.  Both are very close to each other frequency-wise, but a period will be followed by 2 spaces.  That may represent a longer pause for your fingers, allowing them to get back into position.  So if you have a choice, you should put the comma in a better position than the period.  Now, if we were looking at only frequency, that's exactly what we would do anyway, so I guess this idea is useless after all. :)

The only modification I've done to Colemak is change the two "<>" keys to "?!". I'm quite happy with the change; In English, the <> keys are quite uncommon.

I think from an elegance point of view Shai's choice of not moving punctuation characters is right.

Indeed the "rare" characters (rare in English text) are often used as hotkeys, in programming languages, in CLI's, ... exactly due to their good Qwerty position.  So that's a good reason to keep them in place.

The only ones I'd swap are [ ] and ( ).  Semicolon is much more common than colon for Perl/C programmers, but for others it's probably an interesting swap as well.

Another drawback with moving characters is that you can't move your physical keys accordingly, if you want to do that.

I agree on many designers giving too much weight to letter frequencies alone. Even Carpalx - which is often cited as an effective evaluating tool for layouts - has been shown - in this forum - to not take into account for instance same finger frequency (a penalty).

Problem is: it is very easy to sketch a program which evaluates letter frequencies (on different rows) and same finger key presses, but flow is much trickier to measure. Better designed layouts make a balance among many parameters. To the untrained eye they may seem improvable, but as the saying goes: the better is the enemy of the good.

I agree that when you start using a layout, you are prone to sequences bursts. It happened to me, too. I think that's because some sequences soak into your muscle memory more easily. The more you use a layout, the more you will be typing without interruptions. However, even at higher speeds you are likely to hear micro-interruptions, because some "privileged" sequences will always be easier.

I wonder what you make of my layout, because it runs counter to quite a few remarks here, especially w.r.t. the space. I place it on the home row, between E and T. This is done because of digraph frequency (E SP, SP T).

My aim is laziness and accuracy, not necessarily speed, so I simply avoid "unpleasant" keys. I turn the space bar into an extra modifier key to win back the lost characters and put "most wanted" punctuation on the home row. An unexpected consequence is that it becomes more attractive to use thumbs on the bottom row, because there is no danger of getting a spurious space.

Here is the current, 4th, version: http://nlite.sdf-eu.org/wip/keyboard.html

Well, it's all about minimizing energy expenditure isn't it? Lacking a good physiological model, I can only say for instance that (as a lefty) I prefer to type I with my left thumb rather than O with my right ring finger (but I keep the I there because of the IN digraph). Colemak has two of the most frequent letters (ET) on different hands. I don't agree with this "no hand left behind" policy. My hands are not a democracy.

If you're prepared to move the comma closer to the space to increase flow, I would like to argue that an even better flow is what I did with the space. It's the most frequent letter, so it belongs on the best spot in the home row (E in Colemak if you're right-handed). The frequency of E-space and space-T is higher than comma-space or anything else, so the space must be between E and T. E can't be put on the index finger, so as a first approximation I would swap the two index finger clusters.

I agree that having to shift is highly disruptive, particularly because you have to hold the key down. But it seems a waste to have two shift keys on the home row, while the thumbs just hang there above the best possible modifier key: the space bar.

I would think that the frequency of a shift can't be much higher than that of a comma or period, so in my layout I would only consider sacrificing the slash, minus or x. It would have to become a dead key as well.

According to http://www.letterfrequency.org/#compute … -frequency the frequency of shift is between T and A.  The 4th most frequent key.  I have no idea if thats accurate or not but it does seem high to me.  Most frequency tables ignore shift but of the 2 places i've found that include shift, it was in the top 4 or 5 keys.  I plan to write my own frequency analysis program to study this, but my programing skills suck so it may take me awhile.

Nlite, when I first looked at your layout, I thought the spacebar was shift, but now I see its more of an Alt-gr key.  Does that mean you only have one shift (the original shift key on the right)?  I know that A LOT of people only use one shift key as they type but we should remember that "proper typing" means using both (left shift for a right-hand letter and right shift for a left-hand letter).  I suppose you can get around this by using stickykeys and turning shift into a dead key.

In my theory of typing flow, a space is a break in flow.  This is because the brain has to access each word separately, remember how to spell it, then start typing it.  The space then becomes a sort of trigger to tell your brain, OK, time to start the next word.  This is why I ignore digraphs that include space.  They are just not part of my flow.  At least that seems to be how my brain works, yours may be different.

One other thing, is that I consider the spacebar to be one of the home positions.  In fact its the best home position because you have 2 very strong digits just sitting on it waiting to press space.  And if I ever do choose to consider digraphs that include space, then I think I still wouldnt move it because the spacebar is the only key that makes an easy combination with every other key on the board.  Your E-space-T roll may be marginally faster and or easier but at the sacrifice of almost all other digraphs that include space.  Having said that, I still find the idea very intriguing and I may experiment with something similar in the future.

As far as pushing the bottom row with your thumbs, I'd like to see how that is done.  My thumbs only want to press the spacebar and the 2 Alt keys, anything else becomes laborious.  Do you move the whole hand up?

That's probably including punctuation used by programmers.

The space bar is for punctuation and digits. I still have two shift keys for letters.

I don't see much of a problem there, except for the low frequency space+(.

I don't notice much of a difference in hand position. You don't really need them, but they are useful for avoiding some same finger digraphs. I began to use them more, probably because you no longer have to be afraid to touch the space bar. Of course that's less of an issue on the left or when the space bar is held down for punctuation. Over time I migrated some "good stuff" from the middle/upper right to the lower center-left.

Interesting observation! Sounds plausible.