#ergonomic

Hello! I am Phoenix Lightning. You can also find me at the account @phoenixacxf! I am a college student and I am neurodivergent. Today's hyperfixation is keyboard layouts! So, I decided I'm going to start creating my own keyboard layout. This page is so I can document the process. Right now, I am going to be logging everything I write and start creating my layout at the end of the upcoming week. I will make updates every week or so on my commonly used words, letters, bigrams, and digraphs. Every month, I will try to update the PLKeyboard layout. Within this first month, I will update it weekly. I want to show the evolution of the layout as I create it.

I currently main on the Colemak keyboard layout, so I plan on using it most of the time. As I continue to post, and as I continue to create the layout, I might swap to it.

This layout is going to be made specifically for me, hence why I will be calling it the PLKeyboard. I am going to be prioritizing the following things:

The ctrl+z, ctrl+x, ctrl+c, and ctrl+v layouts should be easy to use (as such, the z, x, c, and v keys will stay in the same spots as in QWERTY and Colemak)

I am left handed, as such, I want to prioritize key usage on my left hand.

I want it to be easy to type bigrams and trigrams. Common groups of two and three letters should feel nice to type.

I want to minimize movement across the keys.

I want to prioritize index finger usage.

As I do more testing, these priorities may change and whatnot. I am unsure on if I want to use the middle row as my home row. I am thinking I may want to use the top or bottom row as my home row. I will do ergonomic testing eventually.

Something I will note is that I will also eventually test out split keyboards and other ergonomic modifications to see if I prefer them. This could drastically change how the layout ends up being.

I will probably not start using this layout for a few months, just some minor testing. I only just started on Colemak so I want to continue to use it as well.

Why am I making this? Only because I want to try it out and experiment. I like Colemak over QWERTY, so I want to see if I can find something I like more than Colemak. If this gets enough of a following, I may open a google forms where you all can input your own text samples so that I can start optimizing this for a larger group of people. I want this to work well for Gen Z in that scenario. In this scenario, I would make both a right handed and left handed layout.

Anyways, without further ado, let's show you guys my top ten letters, words, bigrams, and trigrams as judged based on various writings i had on my google drive (that are purely my writing).

My top ten letters are:

E (not surprising)

T (also not surprising)

A

O

I

N

H

S

R

D

My top ten words are:

the (not suprising)

and

to

I

a

he

of

was

you

it

My top ten bigrams are:

TH

HE

AN

IN

RE

ND

ER

ED

EA

ST

My top ten trigraphs are:

THE

AND

ING

HIS

ERE

YOU

HAT

THI

STA

FOR

In order to calculate my letters, bigrams, and trigrams, I used this app: https://www.dcode.fr/frequency-analysis

For words, I used this: https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp