I'd chose alternation over rolls any day. I'm curious to see your final layout nimbo. If you decide to keep most of the more common shortcut keys on the left hand side, I might even give it a try. I'm talking about the keys Z, C, V, X, W, T, Y, D, E - in order of importance for me. At least those are the ones I use. Another thing I liked about your "mirrored" Imak was that the vowels and the punctuation symbols are on the right which leaves more consonant on the left. I need those for some programs I use.
So I'll see which layouts you end up deciding to "release" and I may give one a shot at the end of the summer.Again, very good job.
For all the layouts that I have built and tried I used to keep the shortcuts in place because using Microsoft keyboard Layout creator I can build any layout over QWERTY and once I click CTRL the layout would behave as QWERTY. This is of course under windows, but I wonder if it can be done under any linux redistribution.
Now I said I am going to talk about the problem that I faced in almost all the layouts that I have tested and it is the same problem.
I am a guy that likes to rest his hand on the laptop keyboard and as I am currently away from home I do not usually have access to a PC to customize it with my own keyboard, so I would say that I am rather stuck with my Dell D620 keyboard. Very often I like to sleep on my belly and type, so there is no way of hovering my hands at this position. Now the problem I faced was only with the right hand and it was that after a long period of typing while my right hand is resting on the keyborad the area ,in the image below,indicated with a red circle which is the bony side of the hand becomes very red. It doesn't cause any pain to the wrist but I expect that after a while the skin in this area will be dead skin as some of you might have experienced from weight lifting, and before this happens ones tend to experience some skin irritation. I actually know the cause of the problem, and know the solution(s). But let us come to the cause of the problem, now suppose that the right hand is hand that is pressing the spacebar as in my case, then it turns out that there are two very important keys that contribute to solving this problem for the hand that presses the spacebar. Referring to QWERTY, the two keys are H and Y. Hitting the H key regularly pulls the hand inward and distributes the weight evenly on the right hand palm. The Y key on the other hands force the user to stretch there hand or most of the time move it, which removes pressures from that area for a while which helps the hand to recover. Now it turned out that it is sufficient to have a key of the weight of H in that position as in Colemak or to have two keys of the weight of f and d in the position of Y and H respectively as in dvorak. An even when I used to train for words on dvorak that did not contain d and f this problem would appear again but when I type regular text it goes away. That is one of the main reason I mirrored Imak, as I wanted the right hand fingers to move beyond the home key more regularly and I wanted to have the option to correct this problem if it occurred again. Now I have L and V in place of H and y and if this did not work I can replace V with W. I expect this problem to occur even for people who hit the spacebar with their left hand and do not hover their hand. If you look at dvorak, the left hand will be no problem for a person that hits the spacebar with his left hand because dvorak has i and y to pull the hand inward, and even Colemak has d and g. So, I will end up with creating three layouts, one for people that hit the spacebar with the left hand, and one for the people that hit the space par with the right hand and and optimized (best version) for ones that hover their hand . I really do not want to replace Y and T on QWERTY with middle weight letters as I think that this is the position that creates a lot of fatigue on the hand due to the excessive stretch of the index finger for people that place their hand on the keyboard. Mirroring Imak has given me the change to distribute the keys in better manner and to create better combos that might lift the hand while typing( like and) and I hope this would solve the problem. other solution to the problem could be to
1- learn to hover my right hands, and avoid typing for long hours while asleep
2- even putting a pad under my right hand.
3- another thing that I could do is either to put on the right hand side on the home row
oaeih ( I like this better because I do no like the roll 'he' to be very narrow between the pinky and the index finger on the right hand )
or
oaieh
Which one do you think is better knowing that the digram he is very common?
Finally, I think I will stick to the final version of Imak if it proved to solve the problem.
