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, L, M, J and V on that side. As well as Y in the accents layer.
- 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 has 2 alpha layers, with an oneshot key used to quickly alternate between them. This is not supported by KLA Next, so some adjustments were necessary:
- Use AltGr instead of the oneshot key, so the tool considers the AltGr held to access the secondary alpha layer.
- Since it would consider shift, another oneshot key in Romak, to be held to access capitalized letters, it could not be in the same thumb as AltGr, so I moved space to the right hand and AltGr to the left hand, which would not change that much the effort.
- Symbols and numbers were excluded from the analysis for all considered layouts. The files with the configurations can be found here.
- With this configuration, Romak beats Colemak-DH and the other considered layouts.
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.
- Consider the 34 key version of Romak, with q, x, k and y in the base layer.
The SFB rate is highly impacted by the position of y, in the index finger, but in practice, with y below h in the accents layer, it shows good performance even for fast typing.
- 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.
Home | Base | Modifiers | Accents and Macros | Symbols and Numbers | Navigation and Media | Maintenance