42 … or 34?

My new keyboard came last week, a Piantor Pro from Beekeeb, a two-person shop in Hong Kong. Quality work.

But the keys are narrower than my fingers (on average), and the deep pinky stagger – offset of the pinky finger’s column of keys – is hard to get used to, after fifty years of conventional typing. To mitigate the problem I made the outer columns repeat their neighbors. I had planned to avoid using them anyway, as practice for maybe someday moving to a board like Ferris without those columns.

Too often after hitting a key on the upper row, I also hit its neighbor below. So I’m considering replacing the nearly flat keycaps with a more traditional style so that my fingers can more easily find the boundaries between them; and if that doesn’t help, replacing the very light switches with stiffer ones for the lower rows.

Anyway. I’ve been fiddling with different algorithms to find an arrangement of the 30 core keys – letters and selected punctuation – that minimizes a crude measure of inconvenience. My most recent algo: start with an arbitrary arrangement and try all swaps of two keys, keep the one that gives the most improvement, and start over; if no improvement is found, try rotations of three, and so on up to six. The best so far:

    B L C M J    Z U I O F
    W R S T K    X H E A P
    V N G D Q    / Y ' , .

This is 33 moves from Canary; three of the moves are rotations of three, one of four, and one of five. Northstar gives the same, except for exchanging the E and A columns. Seven other seeds give very similar results.

(Taking an idea from Engram, this algo assumes that the characters < > are moved to another layer, shift-comma is semicolon and shift-dot is colon, making room for apostrophe/quot as a core key. I implemented this in ZMK on my previous board, but cannot easily do so in the standard version of QMK.)