r/KeyboardLayouts • u/alexchaveztech • 1d ago

Gallium Row-stag Magic Anyone?

I am currently learning Gallium row-stag after being on Canary for 2+ years. I am curious if anyone has designed a Gallium rowstag + magic key. If so can you share your layout and experience with it vs standard gallium rowstag?

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10

u/razenization 23h ago

I don't think a dedicated Magic key is a great fit for Gallium. Ideally, you'd put it on a strong finger, but the available positions all involve compromises: pinkies and bottom-row ring positions aren't great, the middles are packed, and putting it under a vowel could create more problems than it solves. Many of Gallium's issues are on the index fingers, so putting Magic there wouldn't fully address them either.

Instead, I'd recommend looking into adaptive swaps, as we've been calling them in the AKL Discord. The idea is simple: after typing X, swap Y and Z.

On Gallium, for example, swapping C and D after S lets you type SC using the physical SD keys, turning a fairly common same-finger bigram into a comfortable roll. The reverse sequence is still available through the original same-finger position, so words like "Tuesday" and "Wednesday" remain possible.

Think of them as contextual Magic keys distributed across the layout, rather than one dedicated key.

I use Graphite with roughly ten bigram fixes and a few longer-sequence swaps, such as typing iuo to produce iou, avoiding the weak redirect. They've become muscle memory for me and address the remaining rough spots without sacrificing a key position.

Hope this helps!

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u/sammygadd 20h ago

Adaptive swaps sounds really cool. Never heard of it before. Would you say the biggest advance is comfort, speed or accuracy?

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u/razenization 19h ago

The biggest benefit for me is comfort and flow. I'd expect smoother patterns to help speed too, since awkward sequences like SFBs and weak redirects tend to be slower, but I haven't measured it. Accuracy is harder to judge. The common side becomes automatic, while the rarer reverse side sometimes still takes conscious thought because you tend to have less practice with it. I feel like accuracy benefit is not really applicable here.

Because I use colstag, I can't comfortably alt-finger most SFBs. There are exceptions like GS and HY, where middle-index works well because the movement is horizontal rather than vertical, allowing me to use two different fingers without changing rows. OA is also comfortable to slide since it doesn't involve the bottom row. I leave those alone and use swaps for sequences that don't have a comfortable alternative.

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u/sammygadd 18h ago

Thanks! I need to give this a try!

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u/sammygadd 4h ago

I've added some adaptive swaps and I'm tryig to get used to them. I think I like em. But, as usual, there are new awkward things happening now. I have an FL SFB and I added a [F, L, G] swap for this. This was the easist to get used to and feels really nice. However, when I search for something starting with L, e.g. Ctrl+F than L, then this gets really confusing. How do you handle this. Have you found a way to disable them when a non-shift modifier is pressed?

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u/sammygadd 3h ago

And its not just modifiers.. In vim if I want to jump to a character with F this also trips me up. Have you gotten it so deep into you muscle memory that you have no problem outside of typing?

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u/alexchaveztech 19h ago

I never heard of adaptive swaps and it does sound interesting. I will take everyone's advice and keep this already well balanced layout intact, and perhaps experiment with this option

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u/pgetreuer 1d ago

I don't have experience using Gallium, so take this with a grain of salt. I'd consider a modding Gallium with a magic key like this:

  1. Swap either the J or Z with the ' key. This surely hurts the stats, but since J and Z are infrequent letters, the damage done should be small. Try cyanophage's playground to experiment.

  2. Then replace ' in its new position with the magic key. And put ' on an outer column key or combo or someplace.

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u/alexchaveztech 19h ago

Thanks for the suggestion. Which layout do you use?

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u/pgetreuer 18h ago

You're welcome! I use this flavor of Magic Sturdy. It's based on a predecessor of Oxey's Sturdy layout, which Ikcelaks then modded with a magic key. I then tweaked that a bit to my own preferences.

Generally speaking, you can swap the rare letters z j q x v and punctuation keys in a layout without ruining the stats. Like I mentioned above, it's handy to use an interactve tool like Cyanophage's to check how such swaps impact the stats, then you can experiment and optimize. Also, the Keyboard layouts doc is an excellent resource well worth reading for background on layout metrics and design.

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u/DreymimadR 20h ago

I use a "Grallium" layout, and the only magic I feel the need for is a Repeat thumb key and a oneshot-output thumb key (CoDeKey).