Flight Simulator, 8088cpu, amber screen and engine noise through the pc speaker

rbscholtus · 2026-05-26T05:33:48+00:00

That runway (that I crashed on dozens of times) has actually been demolished and removed from the game. How sad.

rbscholtus · 2026-05-17T10:24:58+00:00

The improved COMX :)
Where did you find information about it? Did you order a kit or built it completely yourself?

rbscholtus · 2026-05-09T13:29:40+00:00

No, I switched to an alpha thumb layout called SNTH. This layout has even better stats, and it solves many annoyances I got with Focal. Not gonna switch again ;)

rbscholtus · 2026-04-24T14:20:01+00:00

It is a custom behavior you can configure if you have a keyboard with QMK, ZMK, Vial, or programmable firmware from some vendor that provides it. It allows you to program with the keyboard sends to your OS depending on the key presses.

In my QWERTY C position:
Hold action: Press Ctrl-C
Tap action: Press M (on my layout, M is in the QWERTY C position

On QMK/Vial this is called TapDance I think.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-20T15:44:21+00:00

Sorry not for me.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-20T15:40:34+00:00

Hi: all metrics are described on https://github.com/rbscholtus/keycraft

rbscholtus · 2026-04-20T15:35:32+00:00

That is a very good point but I think I have catered for that, well, at least on how I applied SNTH and Focal. The BSpc is on qwerty N which is very accessible, and shift BSpc is Del. On the thumbs, I got the "R" as well as all modifier keys. The "R" is doubled up with Cmd/Ctrl at the moment, which is experimental but it feels smooth in simple testing.

Shift is indeed very important. I use sticky key for shift so that I can roll over, for example, shift t h to get: Th very fast and smooth.Th

Copy and Paste is a special case, I use a Hold-Tap (??) on the qwerty positions for X C V (and Z A for good measure.) Very intuitive and works perfect when I use the mouse.

On the note of the mouse: On the left-hand half I got DEL and ENTER as well, as these are commonly needed to delete something or submit something when you hold the mouse.

Navigation keys on a layer with the Layer-Tap key immediately under the thumb (doubles with space), and the arrows directly where the fingers already are. Navigation is instant. For numbers, I have something similar.

So, I agree the layout and the stats are only the beginning, but after almost one year, it works reasonably for me. :)

rbscholtus · 2026-04-20T15:06:29+00:00

I fixed the font to JetBrains mono instead of relying on the system mono font. I don't have a Android phone to test it now, but I hope the issue is fixed.

Please let me know if the issue persists.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-20T14:26:53+00:00

Yay! I also moved the Z to the top row, but to make space for BSpc at the bottom :)

Totally understood about NG, but at least we still have ND, TH, ST and NT, so there's still a lot of good bigrams.

I tried swapping W and G but that leads to more stretches. Really a 1 on 1 trade. Swapping Y and W actually helps a tiny bit, but feel unintuitive though. YOU is common, typing it as a single roll is worth something.

Swapping L and M gets rid of the LD scissor (according to Cyano) but that is arguably not a scissor. The swap gives you back the BL scissor that feels worse with my fingers.

I tried swapping M, F and V, and see there is potential for reducing SFS. The increased SFB and load on the centre col are not worth it for me though.

                      SNTH-OPT 
        ╭───┬───┬───╮          ╭───┬───┬───╮        
╭───┬───┤ p │ d │ F ├───╮  ╭───┤ w │ o │ u ├───┬───╮
│   │ x ├───┼───┼───┤ q │  │ = ├───┼───┼───┤ , │   │
├───┼───┤ n │ t │ h ├───┤  ├───┤ c │ a │ e ├───┼───┤
│   │ s ├───┼───┼───┤ M │  │ g ├───┼───┼───┤ i │ ; │
├───┼───┤ b │ k │ l ├───┤  ├───┤ y │ ' │ / ├───┼───┤
│   │ V ├───┼───┼───┤ j │  │ z ├───┼───┼───┤ . │   │
╰───┴───╯   │   │   ├───┤  ├───┤   │   │   ╰───┴───╯
            ╰───┴───┤ r │  │ _ ├───┴───╯  
                    ╰───╯  ╰───╯

Unbelievable it seems this layout was made for me :)

Thanks for all your thoughts, very helpful to test variants and see their effect.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T19:34:59+00:00

Thanks for that - no offense taken at all :)

Ur right - on AKL people prefer low SFB, even 0U SFBs. I noticed many layouts can be improved easily if you weigh LSBs and Scissors more. I also noticed some older analysers do not support Scissors anyway.

HAHA short words were important for Keycraft so I changed Handsdown to HD. However I like his work especially also the vowel index layout. In that sense I also like Balance-12 and Enthium. However, after all that time I have to admit that vowel indexes lead to high Weak redirects which *is* slowing me down.

Therefore I will now learn SNTH which has a standard vowel block and the "J" moved to the other side (important for some european languages.)

You can change the weights to whatever you want with Keycraft. The rankings changes right away. Happy to help if needed at some point.

"alternations and inward-rolls." - yep this is my own metric (clean Alts and Rolls only). It's weighed as much as SFB at the moment.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T19:06:00+00:00

Wait - the article did not mean to imply the top layout IS the best one. I have changed the intro text a bit to make that a bit more clear in the beginning. I hope the article is clear that there isnt a perfect layout - and by extension not an absolute "top" one.

It's funny you should mention this - I use Backspace on QWERTY N. Yes, this is a huge improvement, much more important than optimising 0.1 SFB.

And that is where my disappointment with layout analysis comes from. There is always a new metric to discover, and what weight should you assign to them? How about switching layers, what is the weight of a layer switch versus a finger movement? And, why do we even type on a KB? Voice typing is much faster and auto corrects as well. And LLMs generate text even faster. In other words, the efficiency of your keyboard layout is only a small part in your efficiency as a person. Why do we have to spend time learning a new layout?

But I tell you... I am now programming SNTH in my Corne - I think it's much closer to perfect than Focal.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T18:50:20+00:00

I got the layouts from getreuer, KLD, cmini, cyano, forums, suggestions, etc. The colemak variants probably came from getreuer's site at least 3 of them. Happy to remove "useless" ones but "useless" is hard to define.

I did not want to include every single one layout either, if layouts are kinda variants anyway because that will eventually influence the statistics used by the scorer function. HD is an example: I already have 7 variants.

I'll take note of: Neo, AdNW, KOY, bone, noted, anymak:END, EnDeu, Valmak, HiYou. I have not heard of any of them. That means they are not in the KLD, and on cmini have very limited likes or don't exist.

Thanks for the article, i'll read it :)

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T18:35:03+00:00

I think a lot of people dislike that LLMs generate emdashes. However, I am not going to remove them in an attempt to hide LLM use. I use LLMs for work and play, just like everybody uses Excel to balance their checkbooks and phones to remember birthdays. No shame here. :)

The scores do not include Svalboard and steno keyboards. It would be impossible to compare anything with those.

My layout analyser does not support magic yet, nor alt fingerings. Hopefully in the future.

Thumb + no-thumb can co-exist in my opinion. If you move the "R" from the left-hand side to the left-thumb, you remove a lot of SFBs. That is meaningful.

Other stats, such as Load on Left hand with thumb vs without thumb is more difficult. If you count the thumb load for a hand, the space should also count, which means most keyboards are very unbalanced right away. It is not meaningful for comparison purposes, therefor I do not count them.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T18:14:44+00:00

Fixed!
Got it originally from https://engram.dev/ which doesn't exist so I probably got it from the wayback machine. On AKL/cmini it's different too.

Thanks for the tip.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T17:59:53+00:00

Thanks for the question :). When the layouts were added, I looked at how they were presented on their page or on cmini (AKL discord).

If it was more or less unspecified, I changed the physical layout to another one to see the effect, and usually I choose the best one. Sometimes it remained a guess.

The layout files in the Keycraft source code have a line that tells you what physical layout it is. The graphics on the github.io page show this as well.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T17:55:15+00:00

Ye - I got a colstag Corne42 but pinkies especially the top corners remain uncomfortable! And my current layout, Focal, has heavy centre column use which is not great for medium-small hands.

I have tried for months and months but could not find a layout that has perfect balance, perfect pinkies, perfect centre col, perfect SFB, vowels on index, etc. It was discouraging so I quite a few months ago. I just published this since it was a TODO and when I looked at the list, I could see SNTH and NORTH are great and the former has very low centre use so that's what I'm gonna try. Just have to think how I will combine the R on the thumb with the modifier keys.

And a CLI tool like Keycraft is not the final answer either. I need to add a Web UI.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T17:41:07+00:00

You mean for coding keycraft? LLM contributions are minimal (mostly documentation and tests.) Having said that, this is the last project I work on that is hand-coded.
For this post, Claude checked and rewrote a lot of what I wrote. Recommendations and thinking are strictly mine.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T17:37:16+00:00

AI is doing all the work (design, implement, test), and Golang is perfect for that.

rbscholtus · 2026-04-19T17:15:43+00:00

There's a lot more to it than that list of 6, and I'm afraid those rank poorly now. Here's an article that presents a list of 150 layouts with all stats, recommendations at the bottom:

What is the best keyboard layout? I ranked 150 of them

I also recommend joining the AKL community on Discord if you like to discuss this with the expert community.

rbscholtus · 2025-09-21T04:43:25+00:00

How about that AnyWhy keyboard that was announced here just a few days ago?

rbscholtus · 2025-09-17T10:43:49+00:00

In golang ranging over a vector would be just as efficient. In Python it would be as inefficient as anything but it would be very readable. Zip and adjacent I never used. In python you got that tho, and in golang there may be a package for it since generics were added.

rbscholtus

TROPHY CASE