Minor improvements

[xsrvmy]

This looks like a very good layout that balances alternation with rolling. I plugged it into my layout optimizer I wrote, and it came out with some minor improvements:

• cycling dot, comma and quote so that quote is in the middle. This is the biggest improvement, substantially reducing SFB. Swapping only ' and , is still does most of the work if < and > being out of order is a concern.
• cycling VBK so that B is on the home row. B is the most common letter out of these three, and the MB and CK bigrams become easier.
• cycling QJX so that Q is on the left hand. This came down to the fact that I used Norvig's data where the least common letters in order were ZQJX. It's not worth it if you use vim.

[ajetz]

• Swapping the comma dot and apostrophe is what made me sign up in github. I really think the dot and comma should retain their qwerty positions and then the apostrophe moved to the index finger location...i.e M on qwerty. Is there any tool I can use to analyze the effect of this change?
• I think BKV is fine because the CK bigram is far more common than the MB biagram. So K on home row is still alright.

[hashawk]

@ajetz https://oxey.dev/playground/
This is my favorite layout tool to look and compare different layouts. I used apt as a base and then you can change each key to your liking and see how it affects it.

[ajetz]

Thanks @hashawk. But I think the cyanophage analyser is actually better for me as I use anglemod on a regular keyboard. That being said...any reason why this layout shouldn't look something like this?

If anything, it improves rolls a bit, and allows for a more comfortable CK MP & MB.
Even @xsrvmy suggestions work out quite nicely with Q on the left hand and B on home row. X is also better where it is as it's more frequent than Z. Q is also more frequent than Z...so it gets the worst position relative to the other options.

I also had the idea of swapping G & F...such that the GH bigram is typed with index and middle finger.

There's also this, which is pretty close to the original, but scores slightly better.

[hashawk]

I chose the original layout for my daily use. I have been using it for almost two years and have made adjustments on my own with thumb keys, as I have a Dygma Defy Keyboard. I like the original key placements because they provide easy and logical access to Vim key bindings. However, your improvements are valid. If it works for you, test it out. Looking at layout analyzers only gets you so far. The best way to understand the layout fully is to test it for a few weeks. Then you can feel what is out of place.