The ZQ Keyoard Layout
I’ve spent quite some time on keyboards in my previous posts, and this post is no different. After several months of tweaking my original layout, I have more or less settled on the final design. You can get the sources at my repo here.
Is for the name “ZQ”, it was originally chosen from the way these keys were arranged; the location of these keys have since changed, but the name has stuck.
Base Layer
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
! # * □ □ □ □ / ~ $
□ □ ; y o p v 1 1 m f t r _ □ □
□ 2 a i e u w 3 2 h j k l n 3 □ <--- Home row
4 z x q ' " b d g c s 4
5 6 7 8 9 5 , 6 7 8 <--------- Thumb row
Left-side legend
1) PageUp
2) Escape
3) Tab
4) Shift
5) Insert
6) Super (Windows key)
7) Space
8) Caps Lock (remapped with xmodmap to Hyper key)
9) Control
Right-side legend
1) PageDown
2) Return
3) Delete
4) Shift
5) FN2
6) FN
7) Alt
8) Right Alt (aka "AltGr" for US International Layout)
FN Layer
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ ? 7 8 9 = a a ` \ . : & □ □
□ □ - 4 5 6 + ^ @ b { ( ) } □ □ <--- Home row
□ 0 1 2 3 % | [ < > ] □
□ □ b □ □ □ □ □ □ □ <--------- Thumb row
Left-side legend
a) Home
b) Space
Right-side legend
a) End
b) Backspace
FN2 Layer
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ l g h i □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ k d e f □ □ □ a b c d □ □ □ <--- Home row
□ j a b c □ □ □ □ □ □ □
□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ <--------- Thumb row
Left-side legend
a) F1
b) F2
c) F3
d) F4
e) F5
f) F6
g) F7
h) F8
i) F9
j) F10
k) F11
l) F12
Right-side legend
a) Left Arrow
b) Down Arrow
c) Up Arrow
d) Right Arrow
Keycap Arrangement
I have not covered this topic before, but I think it is worth mentioning. On the underside of each keycap, there is a number; presumably for the row that the keycap is designed for. I’ve rearranged the default keycap placement to better reflect how I use my keys. The biggest change from the default Esrille setup is that I vertically flip the thumb row keys, so that they are “upside-down”. I find this arrangement more comfortable for my thumbs.
n n n n n n n n n n n n
n n n n n n n n n n
n 3 3 3 3 3 3 n n 3 3 3 3 3 3 n
3 3 2 2 2 2 2 n n 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 <--- Home row
1 2 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 <--------- Thumb row*
Legend
n) No number
1) Row 1
2) Row 2
3) Row 3
*The thumb row keycaps are flipped upside-down for better comfort.
Typing Speed
After some time, I realized that the end goal was to design a layout that was not more “optimal” in the sense of mechanical efficiency, but rather to design something more comfortable to use.
I can readily say that even at this early stage, I tend to like this layout more over Qwerty because my hands stay put as I type.
The only time I move my wrists from their default position is when I need to reach the six keys up top in the base layer (!#*/~$).
It may turn out that this new layout does not really improve raw typing speed; but really I don’t care because home-row access to parentheses and the backspace key are too good to let go.
Other Thoughts
The design has changed quite a bit in these past few months. After some initial trials, I realized that the arrangement recommended by my program was not really optimized the way I wanted it to be. For one, the corpus I fed into the program was not very good because it didn’t realy reflect my real-world use-case; I use Vim-style HJKL keys almost everywhere, and really to get a truly representative histogram of keypresses, I should have used a keylogger for some months to record my actual usage. As time was of the essence, I decided to just evolve the layout gradually, tweaking bits I found annoying.
One hurdle was simply trying to avoid using the same finger in succession. In the current ZQ layout, the right index finger is charged with six keys: MHBFJD. It took a lot of trial and error to arrive at this combination.
I also just kept the original Qwerty placement of the HJKL keys. The main reason is that I use these keys all the time, so much that they deserve their original home-row placement. And, actually they helped in reducing same-finger consecutiveness (J and K are rare letters in English).
Another point of concern was the interaction of some key combinations like YN and <Return>.
It is common to type either Y or N and press <Return> immediately after, when dealing with interactive torminal programs.
The same goes for some UNIX-y combinations like ~/ for the home directory in the filesystem, or * and / for interactive search in vim(1) and less(1), respectvely.
The current design of ZQ strives to make these combinations easy to type.
Lastly, I paid a great deal of attention for certain common letter combinations — in particular, “gh”, “ch”, “sh”, “th”, and “wh”. Because I decided to keep HJKL keys on the home row, and because H was assigned to the right index finger, I had to make sure that I place the GCSTW keys either on the left side of the keyboard (as I did with “W”), or place them for the other fingers. This effort alone resulted in dictating where most of the keys ended up.
After all that’s been said, time will tell if I truly do end up using this layout. I have a friend who uses Dvorak for work and Qwerty for gaming; perhaps I’ll end up in a similar boat.
