Thoughts about keyboard layouts i have used

A brief log of what i used, when i used it, how it felt, and why i moved on. Where layouts are presented i've chose to show them in "ortholinear" form (suitable for column staggered keyboards) with the understanding that each column is assigned to a finger from the appropriate hand.

Let the listing commence!

QWERTY

Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L ;
Z X C V B N M , . /

Period: late Babylonian - 2008 ?
Feel: unknown
Dropped because: i realised that there were other options and i was a teenager

Colemak

I think i found this by looking up a list of "alternate keyboard layouts" which, at the time, probably had two entries and this was the only layout from the then contemporaneous century.

Q W F P G J L U Y ;
A R S T D H N E I O
Z X C V B K M , . /

Period: 2008 (?) - 2011 (?)
Feel: very good, except the classic lateral stretch bigrams or, at the time, "my index finger hurts"
Dropped because: i was young and thought that i could do better

ISRQ

For your amusement i present

' F U Y , G P D M V K Z
A N E O H L T I S R Q
/ W ! B ; C - . J X

Actually it was worse than this, i mixed and matched punctuation (eg ! and ? on one key) and various other things.

The only PNG i have of the layout

As i wrote at the time

I have been using ISR for many a year now, and I can't quite recall what I created it to achieve.

Period: 2011 (?) - 2013
Feel: terrible, but dang it i made it
Dropped because: i learned about a concept called humility

Side note: i ended up emailing the author of CarpalX about this layout because i was young and naive and they graciously and patiently replied to explain to me how wrong i was about everything. Thank you Martin Krzywinski!

Colemak DH

Eventually i looked up whether somebody had made a "colemak but better" and lo, people had done exactly that!

Q W F P B J L U Y ;
A R S T G M N E I O
Z X C D V K H , . /

Period: 2013 - 2016
Feel: great! no complaints especially once i discovered the angle/wide mods
Dropped because: it was boring to young me

Workman

Q D R W B J F U P ;
A S H T G Y N E O I
Z X M C V K L , . /

Period: 2016-2018
Feel: not great! noticeably worse than colemak dh and it made my hands hurt
Dropped because: it made my hands hurt

Colemank DH (again)

I grew tired of hurting hands.

Q W F P B J L U Y ;
A R S T G M N E I O
Z X C D V K H , . /

Period: 2018-2022
Feel: same as before, great!
Dropped because: keyboard layouts were going through a renaissance and i had the NIH itch again

VLOM

There's lots to say here, so i'll just point at the link

https://git.sr.ht/~tslil/keyboard

V L O M Q W F U H .
S R A T K Y C E N I
X J ' D Z G P / B ,

Period: 2022-2024
Feel: efficient but staccato, no fluidity
Dropped because: i realised that my optimisation criteria were not creating the sort of layout that i wanted to actually use

Pine v4

Unfortunately the author of this layout appears to have removed their pages about the layout. I can say that i came to this by playing around on the following website

https://keyboard-layout-battles.fly.dev/

where it seemed that most people found this layout quite comfortable.

Q L C M K ' F U O Y
N R S T W P H E A I
J X Z G V B D ; , .

Period: 2024-2025
Feel: alright, more fluid than VLOM and my fastest layout (109WPM monkeytype on a laptop on the bed) but "fiddly" right hand
Dropped because: i felt that there were many layouts converging on the new home row meta (NRTS HAEI)

Gallium

Pine v4 was fast, but too fiddly for my taste. I asked around on some keyboard layout communities which of the new wave of (NRTSHAEI) layouts was worth trying and the answer was essentially "they're all good". Gallium beat out Graphite for me for not optimising punctuation and having a row stagger/angle version ready (work laptop i'm looking at you!).

B L D C V J F O U ,
N R T S G Y H A E I
X Q M W Z K P ' / .

Period: 2025 - ?
Feel: very nice, less "fiddly" than pine v4, time will tell whether it beats colemak dh for my taste