An archive of alternative keyboard research in 2025 in which I studied leading layouts and built my own.

as of late 2025 I am using my own "wide mod" variant of QWERTY shifting the right hand over by 1 letter. The ergonomic benefit of this alone feels like it solves my biggest ergonomic contention of keyboards/QWERTY. Turns out keyboards are broken by design for the vast majority of people that are not splittable or doing a mod like this, as the hands are too close causing unnessecary deviation of the wrist.

Ultimately I discovered alpha thumb layouts are suboptimal for ergonomic and other biomechanical reasons, and that the thumb key is much better suited as something more useful like one shot modifier, backspace, enter. This is from the perspective of a programmer, in which the weighted calculation benefit of optimal symbol access is more important than a few more wpm.

I am confident the best utilization of non-space thumb key is as OSM and can stay active if held -> then mapping backspace itself to a homerow key. This makes thing like hitting backspace n times, as often required, to clear several characters is much nicer, in addition to nav-layer type combos (ctrl backspace)

I concluded that something like a graphite/gallium are the best overall layouts as of 2025. I noted a specific variant of these layouts is optimal for split keyboards specifically, but I would submit that the base design of these layouts is still best for row staggered keyboards.