ThanksAndTechNotes

I'd heard about Dvorak, and I decided to make the switch. But even after about a week, I still didn't like it at all; especially the L and apostrophe keys seem to me especially poorly-placed (or maybe I just have short pinkies).

I looked into it some more, and I began to learn about various alternative layouts. In particular, Asset and the Carpalx partial/carpalxq inspired me to see that the 80/20 rule applied; a good layout could give over 80% of the ergonomic and speed advantages, with under 20% of the retraining effort. However, neither of those existing solutions had the international support I was looking for, and also I thought I could do even better, so I decided to design my own. One resource which was useful was typeit.org, where I could easily see which accented characters were needed for over 20 languages.

This work would not have been possible without tools like Portable Keyboard Layout and Frank Grießhammer's keyboard-layouts tool. Also, Keyboard Layout Analyzer is pretty darn cool.