
BEAKL – Theory and observations to find the optimal keyboard layout (2017) - O_H_E
https://deskthority.net/wiki/BEAKL
======
mmel
As someone who's learnt both colemak and dvorak in the past, it is my opinion
that the utility of being able to use qwerty anywhere, at any computer,
without having to adjust settings or install and configure keymaps, far
outweighs any purported advantages of either colemak or dvorak or any other
exotic layout.

That said, other people's situations will differ from mine, and I can see why
you would switch if you were say, writing slabs of prose in seclusion, or
lived in a country that is majority non-qwerty already.

~~~
Fellshard
I learned Colemak on my work machine while using QWERTY on my home machine. It
made typing in general rough for a time, but forcibly transitioning back and
forth has eventually gotten me to the point that when using my work laptop, my
fingers instinctively go into 'Colemak mode', and when using my home laptop,
my fingers instinctively go into 'QWERTY mode'. It's an extremely useful
switch to be able to manually toggle in my head, as it's no longer crippling
to use someone else's keyboard.

~~~
modernerd
How long did it take you to feel comfortable switching back and forth? How
fast do you type?

I spent a year switching between Colemak and Qwerty (but mostly using Colemak)
and the transition never became comfortable for me.

~~~
Fellshard
I'm not sure how long it took to settle - it's one of those things you don't
realize has become natural until you actively notice it - but I think it was
the scale of a couple of months.

I'm not sure if there's a 'special recipe' to be generalized to all people;
unfortunately, I only have my experiences on this to draw on, and the stories
of a few others.

Does the transition just feel disjointed for you, like it takes you a few
minutes to switch modes fluidly? Or is it longer-term?

~~~
modernerd
It's longer term — I have to type one or the other for a few days before it
feels like I'm not fighting the keyboard. Glad to hear it's not like that for
everyone, though!

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linsomniac
One day they will come up with an advanced keyboard layout that keep hjkl
movement keys, and I'll give it a try.

I wonder how much of a day of typing can be generalized to a keymap that is
good for words and prose input, even code input, and how much is meta things
like navigation, and editor commands or window manager commands, etc... I also
wonder how much varies from person to person. I feel like I do a fairly small
amount of prose or code input but a lot of window navigation, scrolling,
thinking...

Honestly, though, keeping qwerty and switching to a ErgoDox has made me
extremely happy and uninterested in trying another keyboard layout. I have the
qwerty layout mostly as it is on all my other devices (Chromebook, laptop,
workstation), but I have a bunch of little tweaks for my work environment
including customization for work like modifiers for tiling window manager and
different layers for coding characters and special functions (mouse paste and
browser back).

I have a friend that had it set up so that in insert mode in vi it was Dvorak
and in command mode it was qwerty so hjkl worked. Based on people I've seen
switching between Dvorak and qwerty, that seems awfully painful.

~~~
jasone
I use Dvorak (5 years total, vs 25 with qwerty), and IMO Dvorak is clearly
superior for the specific case of vi motion (hjkl). Dvorak places these keys
on 4 separate fingers rather than 3, and their relative positions make just as
much sense as with qwerty. I've used vim since 2005, but before that I used
emacs for 11 years, 3 of which was on Dvorak keyboards. I similarly found
qwerty vs Dvorak to be a wash in the context of the editor.

The only combination that has given me trouble with Dvorak is OS X hotkeys and
mouse (can't reach some hotkeys while right hand is on the mouse). OS X and
trackpad works fine with Dvorak.

These days I use Dvorak layout even on my Android phone, and my family's
computers are configured to easily switch between layouts, so I only rarely
find the need to suffer qwerty. This is a strong contrast to 2001, when I last
switched back to qwerty.

~~~
snthpy
I agree. After 15 years on QWERTY and now over 10 years on Dvorak, I find the
navigation in vim with the default hjkl keys in Dvorak better than in QWERTY.

I'm considering switching to Colemak but the vim key mappings concern me.

~~~
ealhad
If your fear lies in hjkl, you can try Colemak.

\- h and l are really close, and if you move your fingers a bit you can have
index on h and middle on l.

\- j and k are on the same column, with j on top and k on bottom. That reminds
me of “natural scrolling”.

------
taneq
I feel like my typing speed (80-85wpm) is almost never the limiting factor for
my being able to enter data via keyboard. I can see it being an advantage for
recording realtime voice conversations (ie. an official transcriber or
someone) but I'd guess that for the majority, while the marginal advantage of
switching layout may eventually pay off compared with the annoyance of having
to relearn to type, the annoyance of having to switch between layouts when
using any computer other than your own would make it a net loss overall.

I'm not saying that QWERTY can't be improved upon, just that it's probably
"good enough" that it'll stay the standard while keyboards remain relevant (in
much the same way that jpeg and mp3 are "good enough" that they're unlikely to
be broadly supplanted.)

Edit: Thinking more about it, I don't think you can even evaluate the quality
of a keyboard layout without specifying the target user. On one end of the
scale, you have a complete novice who's single finger hunt-and-pecking. A
hexagonal grid with letters/numbers in alphanumeric order is probably the
easiest for such a user (maybe even doing away completely with the concept of
a shift key). At the other end of the scale you have an expert touch typist
who's willing to devote significant time to training with a new keyboard
layout. Such a user could probably benefit somewhat from a fancy new layout
such as this, but would already be fast enough using a standard QWERTY layout
that they'd see minimal returns.

~~~
SloopJon
I use Dvorak exclusively at work, and move between QWERTY/Sholes and Dvorak at
home. I'm a better typist with Dvorak than I ever was with QWERTY, but I admit
that I'm slightly worse at QWERTY since adopting Dvoark.

For me, however, it's much more about comfort than typing speed or accuracy.
Two of the touted advantages of Dvorak are: reduced finger travel, by putting
frequent letters on the home row; and frequent alternation, by putting all the
vowels on one side.

I'm intrigued by the effort grids used in designing BEAKL. I agree intuitively
with the idea that the pinkies are much weaker, so perhaps a home block does
make more sense than a home row.

~~~
lifthrasiir
It is true that main perceived benefits for alternative layouts are a long-
term affordance rather than a peak speed, but in my experience the threshold
is pretty high, if not non-existent (the professional transcription typically
uses a dedicated keyboard layout with lots of common phrases anyway, so the
general-purpose layouts are not relevant there).

I'm not a proficient English writer but I had been in a similar debate for
Korean keyboard layouts, with a major split between consonant-vowel models
(두벌식 "bipartite type") and initial-medial-final models (세벌식 "tripartite
type"). For your information, a single Hangul syllable consists of one initial
consonant, one medial vowel and an optional final consonant, with clusters
possible for each part. Tripartite models can be (at least theoretically) more
accurately optimized as frequency distributions for initial and final
consonants would be pretty different, at the expense of slightly more keys to
fit in. This theoretical consideration, combined with the fact that distinct
keyboard layouts were directly tied do distinct typewriters in 70s and
standardizing on the existing layout would effectively encourage a single
typewriter, made the Korean government to standardize on entirely new layouts
[1] with a bipartite basis. Nowadays tripartite layouts are supported in all
major OSes but users are hard to find.

I had been a reasonably fast typist both in English and in Korean. I can
continuously type Korean at sustained 600--700 strokes per minute [2], both in
the standard bipartite layout and in a well-known tripartite layout (though I
do feel pain after typing too long in the former). I can also type English at
sustained 90--100 wpm in QWERTY. For both cases these peak numbers were highly
meaningless even in the most favorable condition; a brain is not _that_ quick.
I had even done various transcription works from time to time and the main
limiting factor was a recording quality and not the typing speed. (My work is
by no way professional, but I have heard that one task was also sent to a
professional transcriber and he/she had gave up due to the recording quality.)
That's why I finally gave up learning DSK or elks.

[1] The standardized layouts were different for typewriters and computer
keyboards; two are similar enough to be considered as a single layout but the
former is typically termed quadripartite rather than bipartite.

[2] "Strokes" because consonant and vowel clusters often take multiple
keystrokes. Roughly comparable to 100--150 wpm in English. Of course, all
these numbers are not directly comparable to those in the typewriter era.

------
SloopJon
This links to deskthority.net, which says, "BEAKL 9 is currently the
recommended layout for general audience." However, there is a link to the
shenafu.com, which shows BEAKL 15 as the latest recommended layout.

Looks like this changed last month:

[http://shenafu.com/smf/index.php?topic=89.msg2323;topicseen#...](http://shenafu.com/smf/index.php?topic=89.msg2323;topicseen#msg2323)

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TACIXAT
I would really like to see an analysis for an optimized swipe layout. The
biggest goal would be to reduce ambiguity of words.

------
deegles
I switched to the optimized QGMLWY once and worked up to 60wpm or so. I could
have kept improving except for a couple of deal breakers... not being great at
switching back to QWERTY and not having it on my phone. If I could solve
either I’d still be on it!

------
Sniffnoy
So how does this compare to carpalx[0]?

[0] [http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/](http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/)

------
equalunique
Thanks for sharing. Personally, I think BEAKL looks very good:

Firstly, I found that keeping the up/down & left/right keys beneath the index
and middle fingers was very comfortable to use with the RSTHD layout[0]. It
follows then that I probably will enjoy how BEAKL places it's nav keys.
Perhaps I will like it even more, because the Page Up, Page Down, Home, and
End keys are also very important to me too - keys which seem to be positioned
very ergonomically with BEAKL.

Secondly, RSTHD attempts to better organize the upper numrow by putting the
most used numbers closer to the middle and index fingers. This BEAKL layout
doesn't quite do that, but it nearly eliminates the numrow, which is one thing
I actually like about the Technomancy's Atreus [1].

Thirdly, because of my experiences with the Atreus, now I'm a fan of mods on
the thumb cluster. The designers of BEAKL also seem to be fans of it. To
realize this benefit, I would have to find a variant of an ergo keyboard [2],
rather than an ortholinear keyboard [3] suitable for it.

These days I use Dvorak most of the time. It is the first keyboard layout that
I intentionally tried to learn without printed legends on my keycaps, so it
now comes most naturally to me while typing. With QWERTY, I have developed
over a long time a habit of looking at the keyboard sometimes, so I have
difficulty typing as efficiently with it. Luckily Windows 10 and GNOME on
Linux both allow easy switching of keyboard layouts (Win+Space) so it's not
difficult for me to use these on a number of computers both at home and at
work.

I am curious about trying BEAKL so will put it on my list of things to do. For
now, I feel that it would be most important to learn the Steno layout for
typing 200+ WPM via Plover [4]. Perhaps a BEAKL keyboard with a Plover
function layer might be ideal.

[0] [https://xsznix.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/introducing-the-
rsth...](https://xsznix.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/introducing-the-rsthd-
layout/)

[1] [https://atreus.technomancy.us/](https://atreus.technomancy.us/)

[2]
[https://deskthority.net/wiki/ErgoDox](https://deskthority.net/wiki/ErgoDox)

[3]
[https://deskthority.net/wiki/Staggering#Matrix_layout](https://deskthority.net/wiki/Staggering#Matrix_layout)

[4]
[https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/](https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/)

