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binarybottle
Mirror left and right layouts?
First of all, thanks for making this great layout, I really love it! I've been using it for one month and it's very comfortable.
In the current Engram 2.0 design, the vowel letters are on the left, and the most frequent consonants the on the right. I am thinking about mirroring the left and right layouts, to put the consonants on left and vowels on the right. Something like: z v w d l ' " u o y b q n s t h , . a e i c _ p f m r - ? k j x g
Below is my motivation:
When we speak and write English, we often go from left to right. Most English words start with consonants letters (such as s h d m t). Plus, many people typically type on a syllable basis, and the beginning of each syllable is more often to be consonants rather than vowels. As a result. When I type using the Engram 2.0 layout, I often have to go with the reverse direction: start from the right hand and go to my left, which is a little bit unnatural. What if we mirror the left and right layouts?
I checked the Engram paper to understand the design philosophy, but I did not find too much justification of putting the vowels on the left instead of on the right. The only reason I could come up with is probably some bigrams like IE EA can be typed from left to right. But the same justification can be also applied if we mirror the left and right layout, which means some consonants like ST TH can go from left to right after mirroring.
@binarybottle , what's your thoughts on this idea?
Thank you for your excellent question, @franticnerd!
I had given consideration to a mirror version of the layout for the reason you mention above, but did not, because in traditional keyboard designs there are two more keys on the right side. If you place the least frequent letters in English (Z and Q) where these two keys are, then the optimized bigram rolls result in the vowels on the left side in all my tests.
Thanks @binarybottle for the insight!
Regarding that issue, using tools like kmonad (https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad), I can remap the "tab" key to "z", and the "caps lock" key to "q", which will still preserve inward rolls for both hands. In that case, are there any other reasons not to use to the mirrored version?
I have also considered mirroring the layouts ( assuming I can put the q and z lower middle section or number row at 5 and 6 ).
