Whelk

A simple, relatively fast keyboard layout generator with support for multiple languages.

At 0.98 bigram coverage, I'm getting roughly 85K layouts/s on my machine. Here's an example English layout generated using the default settings:

f b l c p z m o u q
s n r d y v t a e i
x h j g w ' k , . /

Philosophy (TODO)

• punish same hand usage
• punish same finger usage (especially on weaker fingers)
• punish scissors (especially between weaker fingers)
• punish uneven finger load
• prefer inward rolls

Why?

• idk

Generate Your Own Layout

• Install Julia
• Clone this repository
• Edit config.toml if needed
• Run julia src/main.jl

TODO

• Use corpus as a source to get better skipgram information around words and punctuation
• Plot the effort over time and optimize the generation algorithm
• Calculate all stats, not just the overall effort
• Matrix math
• Check visited layouts
• Efforts in log space for performance

Attributions

For the word frequency data I'm accessing hermitdave's FrequencyWords repository.

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We don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.