Romak is a new keyboard layout, inspired by Colemak and BEAKL, improved to remove load from pinkies and for typing in Portuguese and English, using a one-shot layer to extend the base layer with accented and less frequent keys.
The number of alpha keys and the number of thumb keys can vary, from a total of 36 down to 28 keys. The variations with less keys reduce the use of pinky and index fingers.
- The name Romak is a combination of my last name, Romão, and Dvorak's name.
- Romak assumes the right hand as dominant and puts all vowels plus H on that side.
- Romak is also designed to favor hand alternation more than rolls.
KLA Next was used to compare Romak with Colemak-DH and some other layouts, using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as text corpus, combining Portuguese and English.
Romak scores better than Dvorak and close to Hands-Down Polyglot.
Heatmaps show that Romak puts more load on middle and ring fingers and less load on index and pinky fingers, when compared to Colemak-DH.
In Romak, most fingers in the left hand will take less load than the equivalent fingers in the right hand.
The Colemak mod-DH analysis tool was also used to compare Romak against Colemak-DH (English text corpus only).
The overall finger usage and SFB rate look better in Romak than in Colemak.
- The Accents and Macros layers extend the Romak base layer to give easy access to common Portuguese accented characters, along with the letters z and x.
- The Lower and Raise layers give access to function keys, symbols and numbers. The symbols are arranged to make them easy to use in software programming, with VIM, and math operations.
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