Nice presentation! It's a good read I think.

steve - surely you've got d and p the wrong way round!

you think its easier to drop down than stretch up! (plus we all know zxcv is sacrosanct)

i definitely think they are both preferable to the lateral move right - it does look to me that colemak d and h are mistakes, but whether yours is the fix, i think you may have it upside down so to speak

and therein lies the problem, it is a case of parkinsons bike shed no doubt! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson … triviality

lets forget it and go and watch some fireworks instead before getting back to the serious work of building our nuclear reactor

I agree on swapping d and p around. zxcv is not sacrosanct to everyone though.

Haha. Nice one. With your suggested arrangement you can easily type the word zxcp, so there's that advantage!

i think i am coming round to your way of thinking..

i wonder what once-bitten, twice-shai thinks about it all?

the other thing that things like this make me think is that defining your layout in software is just not the way - its too annoying, much better to have a programmable keyboard and carry it round with you, i.e. the reason i prob won't implement your mod is because the thought of making the changes on a selection of linux and win machines is too painful to contemplate

a single programmable keyboard means you only ever have to make one mod, irrespective of machine, OS, whatever - and if the keyboard you carry around is any good, then it means you're always typing on a good keyboard which is a big plus

if you've got separate keyboards at each machine, no doubt they are crappy rubber domes, because it would be too expensive to justify otherwise (e.g. having several mechanicals)..

the other thing i could go for is the dongle in the loop approach - that could also work. i would pay good money for one of those.. if i had any talent i would definitely try to make one

DPG is still a good mod in its own right.  But I take the view that if you are willing to deviate from the standard, you might as well make the best available change.

If we are talking about just the left-hand version of my mod, I strongly believe that the gain is significant, even compared to Colemak+DPG. It means 17 keys changed from Qwerty, same as Colemak. I take your point that DPG would reduce it to 16. From a starting point of standard Colemak, in practise, both changes are similar in size, depending on how you measure it. Arguably my version of the mod moves may even be easier as it moves letters which are less frequent.

Perhaps it feels like a bigger change psychologically because B moves a bigger distance, and it looks strange at the top row at first glance. I don't think B is sacrosanct though, it's really only the important shortcuts of ZXCV that are significant.

Oh well, I get the feeling we aren't going to completely agree on this - and I totally understand your aversion as a software maintainer to support the countless possible mods that everyone and his dog could come up with. As bph says, it woud be nice to have a convenient, portable hardware solution so that personalized mods would be easy to handle!

Suffice to say at this stage I am extremely satisfied with my mod, so there is no going back to either standard Colemak or Colemak-DPG for me!

For some reason, this reminds me of the fingering mod (by Cevgar?) that puts your hands over RSTB/KNEI instead of ARST/NEIO! Doing that, I suppose some reordering is in order. It's actually a very comfy way of holding the hands! How well it can fare is uncertain to me. Maybe it fits a double-wide mod best – although then the index finger stretches will be long for sure. This may be compensated by the middle fingers getting more responsibilities.

What an idea. :) And it goes against the grain of the DH-mod in putting even more keys on inwards index finger stretches whereas the DH-mod aims to reduce them.

I thought about W/Y and ended up feeling they're nice positions. Also, holding my ring and middle fingers between the home and upper rows makes for a comfy home position almost like the one I mentioned. However, the ring fingers are weak and dependent fingers! Both the position in itself and the total finger load need to be taken into account. Given this, the W/Y positions certainly shouldn't be used for the most frequent letters. But they're not substantially worse positions than R/I per se I think.

Yes, that hand position thing would require a total layout reworking. Not going to go near that!

I have lately been working on my own version of a key-effort scoring system, together with a tool for analyzing layouts.

https://colemakmods.github.io/mod-dh/compare.html

Naturally my own mod wins when using my own scoring system :-)

I realize these things can be somewhat subjective, but I was quite surprised at how relatively poorly Dvorak came out, as well as Asset coming out quite well. Workman and Colemak come out best of the well-known layouts, as you might expect.

For extra fun, if you have Java applets enabled you can also change the layout and/or the scoring system dynamically to get new results, from within the web page.

hey steve - do you have any plans to put out an xkb version for linux?

I'm not familiar with the xkb format. Although I have a linux box, it is mostly used by my wife, who has so far refused to allow me to adjust her keyboard layout!!

hey dreymar - i feel bad, you've done enough - that said it would be very cool to try out

i need to look at those mappings as well, the last change i took on was the wide angle mods many months ago so looking for something new to try out