Romak is a new keyboard layout, inspired by Colemak and BEAKL, improved to remove load from pinkies and for typing in Portuguese and English, and for coding.
- Romak is the layout used in the base layer of my keyboards.
- The name Romak is a combination of my last name, Romão, and Dvorak's name.
- Romak has a higher SFB rate than Colemak, but lower than Workman, and most of this load goes to the stronger fingers.
- There is a commented out transition path from Qwerty to Romak in the keymap_blocks.h, similar to Tarmak, but moving _ instead of J.
Stevep99's Layout Analyzer Tool was used to compare Romak with Colemak-DH and some other layouts, using the Magna Carta as text corpus, in Portuguese and English.
Romak is more balanced for Portuguese than English, so if English is your primary language, it is recommended to swap some key pairs, like HM, DT, RS.
Pinkies will get less load in Romak, by design. This load will go to the ring and middle fingers.
The Colemak mod-DH analysis tool was also used to compare Romak against Colemak-DH and Workman (English text corpus only).
Despite the higher SFB rate, total finger effort is lesser in Romak than in Colemak-DH or Workman.
- The N-Grams and Accents layer extend the Romak base layer to give easy access to common English and Portuguese n-grams and Portuguese accentuated characters. Getting used to this layer can compensate some common SFBs and uncomfortable h bigrams.
- The Lower and Raise layers give access to function keys, symbols and numbers from the number row. The symbols are arranged to make them easy to use in software programming, with VIM, and math operations.
- The Macros layer gives access to common programming macros and other useful macro related features.
- The Numpad gives access to the traditional numpad from a 100% keyboard, which is better for spreadsheet work.
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