I have given two mappings a try so far, RSTHD and THE-1. I started with a slightly modded RSTHD where I swapped z and j so that I satisfied my vim needs. I practiced this layout with mod tap shift on the index fingers for a week and got up to 30wpm (yay!). But I quickly found myself stumbling with the mod tap shift, especially on the since it’s just so fast on RSTHD. Even after trying all the mod tap tweaking, I never could get The consistently. And since one of the main reasons I got the Kyria was to make things more consistent, this really bothered me. So I decided one shots might be the route for me, and shopped around for another layout I could try.
So I came upon THE-1, which took a little more work to get my j and k in places I liked, but here’s what I came up with:
/*
* ,-------------------------------------------. ,-------------------------------------------.
* | Tab | Z | M | L | U | . > | | V | D | R | ' " | Q | \ | |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------| |------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* |Esc/NAV | A | T | H | E | X | | C | S | N | O | I | ; : |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------+-------------. ,-------------+------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | LShift | / ? | P | F | K | , < |Leader| | | |Leader| G | J | W | B | Y | - _ |
* `----------------------+------+------+------+------+ Enter| | Bksp +------+------+------+------+----------------------'
* | ??? | GUI | Esc | OSM | NUM | | SYM | Space| Tab | GUI | ??? |
* | | | Alt | Shift| | | | NAV | Ctrl | | |
* `----------------------------------' `----------------------------------'
*/I got up to 30wpm in about a week (thought it felt tougher mostly because it’s so similar to RSTHD and I kept getting keys mixed). There’s a few things I really like about this layout, j and k are in what I see as the perfect compromise, very comfy when the fingers are relaxed without bringing too much inefficiency to the layout. I was also a big fan of the one shot shift of the thumb, it was a bit weird to get used to at first since you tap a key and nothing happens, which is surprisingly confusing, but it quickly became very natural and felt so much less finicky than mod-tap or even regular old shift. That being said, THE-1 has a few more same finger bigrams that RSTHD from the get go, and I added more with ke, ex, and bo. Note that I also tried j and k swapped, but the ju, ck bigrams bothered me a lot since they were bigger / more awkward. That being said, I don’t think THE-1 is quite as optimized as RSTHD, e and s on index fingers makes it really hard to avoid same finger bigrams, and while putting comma and dot on the index seems like a decent work around, it turns out e is the most common final letter so really you still get same finger bigrams :/.
In the end these same finger bigrams are annoying me too much to be sure it’s the one for me ;). And I really did like the feel of RSTHD, so I’ve come up with a slightly bigger mod to RSTHD that takes all the things I liked from my THE-1 layout, and tries to get them into RSTHD.
/*
* ,-------------------------------------------. ,-------------------------------------------.
* | Tab | Z | C | Y | F | P | | X | L | , < | U | Q | | \ |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------| |------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* |Esc/NAV | R | S | T | H | D | | M | N | A | I | O | ' " |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------+-------------. ,-------------+------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | / ? | OSS | W | G | K | B |Leader| | | |Leader| V | J | . > | ; : | OSS | - _ |
* `----------------------+------+------+------+------+ Enter| | Bksp +------+------+------+------+----------------------'
* | ??? | GUI | Esc | E | SYM | | NUM | Space| Tab | GUI | ??? |
* | | | Alt | | | | | NAV | Ctrl | | |
* `----------------------------------' `----------------------------------'
*/Note that I moved w and v since I frequently type wl when moving between splits/windows in vim/emacs. And looking at the Norvig data it looks like I can do this with little penalty.
I don’t think I’ll like the one shot shifts on the pinkie quite as much as the thumb, but considering how much more frequent e is than shift, it seems like it might be worth it.
The one shot shift pinkies are working well enough for me so far, and the lower same finger usage is feels nicer thus far. I think this layout strikes a nice balance between what I desired for vim compatibility. That being said I have a few more tweaks I’d like to make. I find that l isn’t super comfortable to type in resting position (ie not actively typing just navigating in vim), so I’ve decided to swap l and m.
/*
* ,-------------------------------------------. ,-------------------------------------------.
* | Tab | Z | C | Y | F | P | | V | M | , < | U | Q | | \ |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------| |------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | / ? | R | S | T | H | D | | L | N | A | I | O | ' " |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------+-------------. ,-------------+------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | / ? | OSS | W | G | K | B |Leader| | | |Leader| X | J | . > | ; : | OSS | - _ |
* `----------------------+------+------+------+------+ Enter| | Bksp +------+------+------+------+----------------------'
* | ??? | GUI | Esc | E | SYM | | NUM | Space| Tab | GUI | ??? |
* | | | Alt | | | | | NAV | Ctrl | | |
* `----------------------------------' `----------------------------------'
*/I’ve also added homerow mods which I use for just about everything except full typing.
My only remaining issue is the placement of ' as it’s on the opposite side of the left hand from two very common l and v conjuctions, this makes writing I'll and I've quite awkward, even for someone with large hands like me.
THE-1 mentions to keep in mind that these are the english apostrophe combinations { n I e t y u } ' { t d l s v r }.
So I’ve decided, for better or worse, that I’m changing up my whole symbol config on that side…
/*
* ,-------------------------------------------. ,-------------------------------------------.
* | Tab | Z | C | Y | F | P | | V | M | ' " | U | Q | | \ |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------| |------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | / ? | R | S | T | H | D | | L | N | A | I | O | ; : |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------+-------------. ,-------------+------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | CAPS | OSS | W | G | K | B |Leader| | | |Leader| X | J | , < | . > | OSS | - _ |
* `----------------------+------+------+------+------+ Enter| | Bksp +------+------+------+------+----------------------'
* | ??? | GUI | Esc | E | SYM | | SYM | Space| Tab | GUI | ??? |
* | | | Alt | NAV | | | | NUM | Ctrl | | |
* `----------------------------------' `----------------------------------'
*/Interestingly , and . are back in their QWERTY positions! I think the new placement makes a lot of sense when I look at it, so hopefully it checks out in practice.
Update: it definitely checks out in practice the rolls are really quite nice with ', not sure why it isn’t in the default RSTHD…
Oh boy, this is a fun one…
So I had started to notice difficulties in typing there and these, the trouble being that you get this strange “rocking” motion with the thumb and the pinkie or ring fingers respectively.
Essentially it’s actually quite difficult to quickly alternate between the thumb and a finger, especially the weaker ones. This discussion actually arose in the SplitKB discord and a user there @johnm, mentioned that he had completely swapped the two halves of RSTHD, to avoid this problem.
On top of this, I was getting annoyed with space as the layertap for the number layer, since I often found myself having to tap space in the middle of number typing. But since I want my navigation layer to be opposite of my right hand (since arrows are on my right), I’ve been constricted to using e for the navigation layer tap.
So, I realized I might solve two problems if I simply swapped e and space. But boy was that a daunting choice since they are literally the two most used keys. While I was at it I wanted to address the uncomfortable placement of v so I decided to shuffle around x, w, and v.
/*
* ,-------------------------------------------. ,-------------------------------------------.
* | Tab | Z | C | Y | F | P | | X | M | ' " | U | Q | | \ |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------| |------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | / ? | R | S | T | H | D | | L | N | A | I | O | ; : |
* |--------+------+------+------+------+------+-------------. ,-------------+------+------+------+------+------+--------|
* | CAPS | OSS | V | G | K | B |Leader| | | |Leader| W | J | , < | . > | OSS | - _ |
* `----------------------+------+------+------+------+ Enter| | Bksp +------+------+------+------+----------------------'
* | ??? | GUI | Esc | Space| SYM | | SYM | E | Tab | GUI | ??? |
* | | | | NAV | | | | NUM | FUN | | |
* `----------------------------------' `----------------------------------'
*/As it turns out, this didn’t actually take that long to adjust to. Relearning space and e was actually surprisingly fast. I’m guessing this is because they are used so frequently, especially since the w and v swap is taking much longer to adjust to.