There are far superior keymaps and key layout to the conventional row staggered QWERTY. Due to technical limitations QWERTY got created and spread as a standard. But does it really make sense?
History
(buzing2003keyboards, page 4) A problem with the printing mechanism was that the key slugs would easily get jammed when a key was pressed before the previous one had returned. Sholes solved this problem by experimenting with the most common English two-letter sequences and assigning the most frequent couples to opposite sides of the keyboard. This resulted in the QWERTY layout, which was optimal in avoiding key jamming.
A paper from 1982 advises you not to switch to another layout other than QWERTY:
Performance with the Dvorak keyboard is only improved by about 5% over performance on the Sholes keyboard. The conclusion is that it is not worthwhile to use alphabetic keyboards for novice typists, nor to change to the Dvorak layout for experts.
(buzing2003keyboards, page 5) In the 1920s it was the industrial engineer Frank Gilbreth who performed time-and-motion studies on many worker activities. His research on typing showed that the Sholes design resulted in more fatigue and errors than alternative key layouts. He also claimed that the typing speed could be increased with a different layout.
Advantages of other Keymaps to QWERTY
Reduce typing effort
Typing speed
Let’s compare QWERTY (Sholes) with the 1930s invented Dvorak.
(buzing2003keyboards, page 8) The skilled typists however showed a 5% speed advantage with the DVORAK layout. Recent experiments by West indicate the same figures [27]. According to West’s findings the QWERTY users reached a typing speed of 81.95 wpm and the DVORAK trained users achieved 84.90 wpm. This is a 4% superiority for Dvorak’s keyboard.
There are no studies that directly compare Colemak DH to QWERTY. I assume that Colemak and its derivatives also yield a substantial benefit.
So what keymap should you use then?
I believe your keymap has to be tailored to your own needs. You should start with a prevalent layout and go from there 🗝🗺.
Inspiration can be found online: https://keymapdb.com/
Physical Key layout
The row staggerd keylayout of conventional keyboards is due to the mechanical limitation of past times. On a typewriter the key was connected to levers that would actuate a small hammer with a letter on top. There are no such limitations anymore.
More movement causes generally more pain while typing. The tilted movement of the fingers are not normal and can cause several sympthoms that cause pain.
rempel-2008-the-split-keyboard-an-ergonomics-success-story, page 6 If you are interested click the link above to read the paper.
A matrix or col stagger key layout reduces the movement to the neighboring key to the minimum.
My Current Keymap/Layout
make a copy.
It is a nobrainer to me that a control backspace is as important to the normal backspace. Most of the time I tent to rewrite the whole word instead of spamming Backspace.
Missing on this picture is the fact that there are also special macros. For example:
The keys S and C are next to each other and thus it is often easier to press them with one press if I want ‘sc’. If I want to write ‘School’ I made it work that if shift is pressed while pressing the combo s and c ‘Sc’ gets typed out.
I really love the features zmk has to offer and use them extensivly. What I really like about my keymap is not that I use colemak but the left hand navigation capabilities.
With my index/middle/ring I can press all the arrows without changing the layer. The navigation keys like Home/End and PageUp/Down is right underneath them. with my pinky I can do control and with my thumb shift. I don’t have to rely on vim or other software to give me a good text/gui navigation experience. I use us int. keyboard layout on my devices. This is good if I want to type german/italian/spanish on the same device without switching. I currently live in Germany so I have a german mode. I can type on other german pcs without a hustle. My keyboard behaves the same as I’m used to. The repo with the keymap can be found here.