brettcannon / defy-layout-scorer

Defy keyboard layout scorer

Step 1 -- create corpus

Pass the paths to files you want to have be included in your corpus to the transitions.py file. E.g.,

python3 transitions.py Documents/**/*.txt ~/Repositories/brettcannon/**/*.py ~/Repositories/brettcannon/**/*.md

This will generate a transitions.pickle file which compares character pairs: the previous character and the (current) character.

Step 2 -- analyze data

Run the compare.py file:

python3 compare.py

This will calculate a score for each keyboard layout. The lower the score the better (i.e., points are penalties), with each keyboard sorted from "best" to "worst" along with a percentage difference of the score from the "best" keyboard. You can change the values in the penalties dict and efforts tuple to use your own weights based on your own preferences.

Do note that the scoring is very simple and very much oriented towards a columnar/matrix keyboard layout! Take the time to tweak the effort grid and any other metrics to your personal preference as the settings are set to my personal preferences. The effort grid from Colemak Mod-DH and Workman are included as commented-out examples if you want a different starting point.

The compare.py script will also output the most used characters to help you make any decisions about your keyboard layers.

Keyboard layouts

The keyboards are stored in the keyboard_layouts dict. URLs are provided in a comment for each layout if you want to look up more information. You can add any other keyboards you want and they will automatically be included in any future runs for the compare.py script.

Example

Key usage (higher is better):
  e t o a i n s r h l p c d u '\n' m y g f . w b " , v / _ k ( ) - : 1 x ' 0 = 2 3 [ ] j 6 4 q 5 8 > z # 7 ^ * ! 9 ? + { } ` ; % < @ ~ & $ \ | '\t'

Scores (lower is better):
  1,619,338 ( 0.0%) : Workman
  1,641,154 ( 1.3%) : MTGAP’s Layout 2.0
  1,644,484 ( 1.6%) : Graphite
  1,644,773 ( 1.6%) : Colemak Mod-DH
  1,654,541 ( 2.2%) : Capewell
  1,655,320 ( 2.2%) : Canary
  1,655,766 ( 2.2%) : Dsend thumbshift
  1,660,312 ( 2.5%) : Carpalx (QGMLWB)
  1,664,793 ( 2.8%) : Colemak
  1,668,011 ( 3.0%) : Norman
  1,670,890 ( 3.2%) : Soul
  1,679,443 ( 3.7%) : Colemak Mod-DHk
  1,681,960 ( 3.9%) : Asset
  1,684,285 ( 4.0%) : Beakl 4 mod ian 1
  1,688,283 ( 4.3%) : Hand Down alt ts
  1,690,256 ( 4.4%) : 3I
  1,690,604 ( 4.4%) : RSTHD
  1,692,134 ( 4.5%) : Phynnboi
  1,698,387 ( 4.9%) : Boo
  1,704,921 ( 5.3%) : Kaehi
  1,714,026 ( 5.8%) : Hands Down reference
  1,726,662 ( 6.6%) : 16-Maks
  1,732,051 ( 7.0%) : Carpalx (QYLDGB)
  1,736,475 ( 7.2%) : Halmak
  1,736,633 ( 7.2%) : Poqtea
  1,750,658 ( 8.1%) : OneProduct
  1,766,414 ( 9.1%) : Sturdy
  1,778,687 ( 9.8%) : Evolved
  1,790,726 (10.6%) : APT
  1,802,712 (11.3%) : Carpalx (QFMLWY)
  1,819,673 (12.4%) : Dvorak
  1,819,673 (12.4%) : Dvorak (Programmer)
  1,839,138 (13.6%) : Blick DHIATENSOR
  1,857,501 (14.7%) : Engram
  2,055,836 (27.0%) : Minimak
  2,418,032 (49.3%) : QWERTY