For a few months now I have been working on a new keyboard layout, and it’s finally complete! I got sucked into the layout wormhole after I started learning Colemak and just wasn’t finding it comfortable. To find this layout I created a scoring system that favoured movements I found to be comfortable, and used randomisation and a simple genetic algorithm to find high scoring layouts. There was also a long period of trialing and tweaking to get it just right.
The qualities I considered important are – low single finger bigrams (of course), a high inwards roll : outwards roll ratio (I don’t like outwards rolls that much), avoiding particularly bad rolls like pinky -> middle finger while keeping particularly good rolls such as adjacent finger rolls and pinky -> index finger rolls. Low travel distance was favoured, but not too highly – it’s trivial to beat qwerty by almost 50% on this metric, but it’s not worth a lot of attention due to diminishing returns.
Here is the layout, inventively named Kaehi –
Wonderlust 