Gallium

Gallium is a keyboard layout and takes inspiration from nerps and tries to improve on it in comfort and speed. Now on Monkeytype!

Gallium Rowstag or Gallium v2, this version was made to cater directly to the average user on a Row staggered keyboard. Beforehand Gallium was made to be compatible with both Columnar staggered keyboards and Row staggered keyboards, you may still use either layout on either key formation but these distinct versions may be slightly better. Columnar Staggered version:

Operating systems

Windows, Mac and Linux are supported in varying levels, I use Linux myself so I'm biased towards agnostic implementations like Kanata. (Windows package made by CTGAP, Mac package made by Dainternetdude and Linux XKB file made by GalileoBlues.)

Goals

Gallium tries to break up repetitive patterns, balance fatigue between the hands and be generally compatible with most people.

To break up repetitive patterns I've chosen to lower the amount of rolls and bring the ratio of alternation to rolls closer together, to do this I made the root vowel hand index letter H. without getting too complicated this affects a large amount of interactions on the vowel hand in general and also has the intended consequence of bringing the hand balance much closer together.

Although Gallium does have some pinky and ring usage that would require work to transition to from Qwerty I ultimately think it's a necessary evil. Otherwise Colemak is much less impactful to the pinkies and would suit said people better.

Gallium is closely related to a few layouts. Although there are a lot of layouts before Gallium that took heavy inspiration from Sturdy the finished layout is extremely similar to Graphite the predecessor of which predates Gallium by a few weeks. Gallium also traces its lineage from Nerps by Smudge, notably changing the vowel block and removing the need to alt finger SP/PS (alt fingering is pressing a letter with a different finger than a strict homerow form).

Weaknesses

Gallium's performance in speed is dependent on a corpus of words just like every other alternative layout is, Gallium does particularly poorly at much more complex words such as Monkeytype's 450k wordlist setting but still does fine at 10k and below. the way it is worse is in SFBs as HY, PY, PH and PF bigrams occur much more commonly in that wordlist, one way to combat this is to alt finger them like spoken about previously.

Etymology

Gallium was named after the element as are most of my older layouts. G does bear significance to the way inner index column movement was optimised for but honestly the name just goes hard.

Changes

Since Gallium has been out there have been some minor changes to the layout that I get asked about frequently,

Firstly, X and Q were swapped since QX never occurs and XQ occurs rarely, this barely affects the stats and is overall a miniscule change.

Secondly, J and Z were swapped since it lowers SFBs and SFS slightly, I see no reason not to do this change.

Thirdly, I introduced a second primary version of Gallium that I called V2, this is for Row staggered keyboards that changes the vowel hand index order slightly, they aren't big enough changes that you would need to switch if you are on the previous version but it is now the default version I recommend for those keyboards going forward.

Lastly, I will be leaving all working previous downloads up on this repository but going forward but I will upload an agnostic Kanata version that will support every version of the layout including angle mod variations for every major Operating System.

Nerps made by Smudge: