halmak

I’ve been happily using Colemak for 10+ years but recently decided to give Halmak [1] a try. Only a month in so I’m still slow, but it feels really good. For programming, though, the best decision I’ve made was to add a numpad and common symbols [2] under a second “shift” key to keep my hands on the home row. [1]: https://github.com/MadRabbit/halmak [2]: https://andrew.kvalhe.im/+qit9y6o8uodxpiqezpxcaw7css6gtfkp

Weirdly, it seems[0][1][2], that the layout doesn't do particularly well by Carpalx's keyboard effort estimator[3], as it gets a total effort score of 2.260, compared to 3, 2.098 and 1.842 for Qwerty, Dvorak and Colemak, respectively[4] (lower is better). In contrast, the halmak repo claims[5] an efficiency gain of +134% over Qwerty for halmak, compared to +77% for Dvorak and +84% for Colemak. Since (one would assume) efficiency and effort should be approximately inversely correlated, these results don't square. I have no idea whether Carpalx's or Halmak's keyboard layout (efficiency|effort) evaluator is more accurate (indicative of real (efficiency|effort)), but the huge disparity between the two is troubling. (Obviously, Carpalx and Halmak use different optimisation methods — Monte Carlo simulated annealing versus an "evolution algorith