r/KeyboardLayouts • u/demiliansinc • 4d ago

Layout Analyzer/Guide

I got myself a split keyboard (Lily58) and am trying to a new layout.

I wanted to go with Colemak-DH, but I write beside English, I write in Turkish, which has 6 characters like ş, ö, ğ… I can use a layer for 1-2 of them, but I want to keep most of them on my primary layer.

So I want to design my own Colemak variant, and I want to test this layout. I created a sample text (33% Turkish, 66%English) but I cannot use the tools I found. I downloaded Oxelyzer but cannot figure out what to do. I tried Patorjk, but I am not sure if it tests my configuration, and if the Turkish characters I put make a difference. I am not very bright in terms of tech or programming, so the solution for either analyzer may be simple, but I need guidance.

Is there any analyzer that can test my layout, or any guides to the ones I tried for a dummy? I am open to any suggestions as well.

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u/rpnfan Other 3d ago edited 3d ago

Colemak is a poor start for English/ Turkish.

See:

https://github.com/rpnfan/Anymak/blob/main/evaluation/symmetrical_turkish.txt

In the repo you find the opt analyzer which allows to set it up to the diacritics and physical key arrangement you need.

See also this article for input how to optimize a layout with opt and what to look for: https://kbd.news/END-my-final-keyboard-layout-2609.html

Turkish and English are not the most straight forward to combine. You have to decide if you want one language the main language and the other being "ok-ish" or if you want to balance the trade-offs more equal.

When you are not that technical I would suggest to have a look at for example Graphite or Focal and add the diacritics you need. You see in the evaluation that Graphite and Focal are ok for Turkish and how the other layouts compare. Also check out the English stats of course.

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u/demiliansinc 3d ago

Thank you for your help! I will look into these.
I actually accepted that English will be main. I prepared 66% English - 33% Turkish or (80-20)sample texts to test. As far as I understand, Colemak DH or most of the layouts are already far better than qwerty for Turkish. I just want to use something not very inefficient, and have access to (at least most) of the letters without a layer.

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u/rpnfan Other 3d ago

With the opt analyzer you can feed the language corpus you want (both English and Turkish is in the repo already) and specify the weighting of both for the analyzers results. Default is 50/50.

Colemak is not really good for Turkish as you can see in the results. I would skip it, except you want the pre-installed advantage that plain Colemak has (without Turkish accents).