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ColemakMods / mod-dh

A Colemak mod for more comfortable typing.
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Proposal: Swap V and K #70

Closed EnricoGhiorzi closed 1 year ago

EnricoGhiorzi commented 1 year ago

Looking at the results from the analysis tool (Layout: Colemak-DH, Configuration: Ergonomic), it appears one of the most common same-finger bigram is KN:

finger 6 KN 0.105%

I tried swapping K with a similarly positioned letter: V. The results are quite good for such a minor change: from the score of Colemak-DH on an Ergonomic configuration

total * 1.670 0.052 0.013 1.735

we get

total * 1.670 0.045 0.012 1.728

and similar improvements are obtained on other configurations and on steveP's analyzer (on English text).

Has this mod been proposed before? Is there any chance of it being implemented in Colemak-DH?

DreymaR commented 1 year ago

Yes, it's been proposed before. Haven't heard from the Q-Mod gang in quite a while, but it was a hot topic back then.

I even tried out the V–K swap. I didn't like it, for reasons explained in my EPKL layout readme:

https://github.com/DreymaR/BigBagKbdTrixPKL/tree/master/Layouts/Colemak/Cmk-Qmods

You should keep in mind that this analyzer, albeit handy, is not very advanced by today's standards. One of the things it fails to analyze is lateral stretch bigrams (LSBs), which is what the V–K led to that I didn't like.

Of course, one other thing that swap leads to is one more pair of keys swapping hands for no compelling reason. This is against one of Shai's Colemak design principles.

I find the KN/NK (and also KL/LK) bigram exceedingly easy to alt-finger. So it hasn't been an issue for me at all.

EnricoGhiorzi commented 1 year ago

Thank you for the info, I was unaware of a lot of recent developements. Some recent analyzers, such as https://o-x-e-y.github.io/layouts/playground/index.html, highlight the drawbacks of swapping V and K. I also found sources where the mod is called Colemak DHv and is credited to Oats. I consider this to close the issue.

DreymaR commented 1 year ago

Oats' layout is something else iirc, he wanted to type without the Angle mod so he fiddled around a bit. Since Oats is blindingly fast(!) with his layout variant, it's obvious that it isn't bad! But I don't think it's as good as using the Angle mod properly.