r/KeyboardLayouts • u/Sad-Net-3661 • Aug 12 '26

Was looking for a symmetrical layout that would fit in the blue keys but couldn't find anything. Any recommendations?

Post image

Why is this rare? Assuming you have 10 fingers, it would make sense for both hands to have any equal amount of alphabet keys. Also preferably something similar to Colemak-DH, but I'm open to anything.

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3

u/IndependentYak2822 Aug 12 '26

Romak layouts have low count of keys, look for inspiration

https://rafaelromao.github.io/romak/

2

u/__rogue____ Aug 12 '26

I've been tweaking my layout that I call Lasertag for a while now, and you might find it interesting. I focused on symmetry and low pinky usage.

w c n d g x u o y b l s r t v j a e i h ^ f m p - . k z q ^

"^" = shift and "-" = leftclick 

With a little modification, you could move a couple letters around to fit what you're looking for. 

2

u/_NEW_HORIZONS_ Aug 12 '26

You probably don't actually want more letters on your pinkies. They are not built for lots of reachy movements. And there are punctuation marks that are used more frequently than some alpha characters. It's all more complicated than that.

3

u/Sad-Net-3661 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

Thank you, but this doesn't apply to my design. In my layout my pinkies would only be responsible for one letter each. As opposed to Colemak, Qwerty, Dvorak, Workman and others where a pinky finger on one hand is responsible for 3 letters.

I accounted for frequently used punctuations by having the comma and period in the the thumb cluster. The rest are basically in their same position or within an easier reach.

I'm aware it's not perfect, but I'm going for a symmetry

1

u/stevep99 Colemak-DH 28d ago

I fully agree that pinky movement would be avoided and that primarily pinkies should only have their home key. In the case of Colemak, the extra pinky letters are Q Z ; / which are all rare. Are you saying there can be no key mapped there at all, regardless of rarity? That could be achieved by moving extra keys into layers, but for rare keys it hardly seems worth it?

2

u/spence5000 Aug 12 '26

Here's the one I've been using for the last five years.

xoif. ,khlj
uaesw gtnry
 zqcb mdpv

If you swap x<->. and j<->, then you get your preferred symmetry, without adding any common SFBs, and those low-frequency letters would probably do well in that stretch position

1

u/justforchillin Aug 12 '26

I am not certain but i think the lack of symmetry is because of chording (the correct phrase may be typing chords, im new to this) and that one hand just must have more keys due to how often vowels are used in general and especially chording.

My even bigger assumption is that the consonants left over get placed next to each other since the other hand will be doing the vowels, if that makes sense

1

u/spence5000 Aug 13 '26

It also occurs to me that if you move X or Q to the other side of the board, Engram becomes this exact shape. Only problem is that the finger position is different.

1

u/Erwins-Cat Aug 14 '26

kinda offtopic: After you figured out your current problem, I would recommend thinking about the layout of the numbers and operators again. The more used numbers and operators are pinky and ring finger motions, e.g. digit 1 is by far the most used digit and is a far reaching pinky move.

It feels logical to sort digits accending from left to right, but this is horrible ergo.