Noted

Noted is an alternate keyboard layout that aims to allow efficient and comfortable typing both in German and English. It is now a member of the Neo family of German alternate keyboard layouts and aims to improve upon them. It shares the third and fourth layers with those layouts and updates the fifth and sixth layer according to the character ordering on the first layer (see here).

The design of the Noted layout was supported by a newly developed optimizer based on a mixed-language corpus (60% German, 40% English).

The Noted layout's goal is to allow comfortable typing of German and English texts (in particular on ISO keyboards) by

• placing frequent characters on well-reachable keys,
• avoiding uncomfortable sequences of keys,
• achieving a pleasant "rolling" typing rhythm (hand changes every two keys),
• keeping the shortcut keys "cvxz" on the left hand and close to the Ctrl-key (so that the right hand remains free to control the mouse),
• keeping punctuation symbols ",." on the familiar (QWERTZ) positions,
• properly accounting for the shift keys in the development of the layout (shift keys are being held until the modified key is released).

What "uncomfortaple sequence" and "pleasant typing rhythm" means, exactly, is often hard to define and in parts depends on personal preference. The Noted Layout considers a set of evaluation criteria, for instance the "number of finger repeats", that shall quantify these "soft" goals.

These metrics and evaluation criteria are generally not new and were already employed in the development of multiple other keyboard layouts. For the Noted Layout, however, some of them were extended and further differentiated.

The Noted layout tries to avoid finger repeats on weaker fingers (e.g., the pinky finger) more than on stronger fingers (e.g., the middle or index finger). Also, lateral finger repeats (for instance, of the index finger in the center column) shall rather be avoided than their vertical counterparts and finger repeats that curl the finger are (slightly) preferred over those that stretch the finger. Finally, repeats across multiple rows are worse than those across only one (or no) row.

The evaluation of consecutive same-hand keypresses that are not finger repeats is differentiated by

• which fingers are involved (for instance, a sequence from middle to index finger is to be preferred over a sequence from middle to ring finger),
• how many rows are crossed,
• whether a press of a lower key on a short finger follows the press of a upper key on a long finger,
• whether one of the keys draws the hand out of its home position.

For the design of the Noted layout, a new keyboard layout optimizer has been developed, which is based on the optimizer of Arne Babenhauserheide (ArneBab) that already contained variants of some of the metrics and was used for the design of the Mine layout.

For using the Noted layout in Windows, the usage of ReNeo is recommended. A corresponding configuration file can be downloaded here.

In Linux, there is the option to add the Noted layout to the xkeyboard-config (usually under

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols

setxkbmap noted

There exist no drivers for MacOS, currently.

Well-known representatives of alternate keyboard layouts for the German language on ISO keyboards are layouts of the Neo family: Neo2, Bone, Mine and KOY.

Of those layouts, the Noted layout is most similar to the Mine Layout. It uses the same vowel block, the same positions for the shortcut keys "cvxz" and "h" and "k" on the right pinky. In contrast to Mine, the letter "s" is located on the left home-row instead of the "r". This avoids shift collisions with the letter "c" (finger repeats on the left pinky) while typing "Sch" which is frequent in German. Furthermore, the consonants on the right hand are arranged differently to increase typing effort and avoid the notorious index finger "mpf" (appearing in German words such as "impfen" and "empfinden").

Shortcuts and Punctuation

Both Mine and Neo2 place the shortcut keys "cvxz" on the left hand in reach of the Ctrl key. This allows using these shortcuts while leaving the right hand free to use the mouse. While the Bone layout puts the "x" on the left hand, it is located far from the Ctrl key. The KOY layout places both the "c" and the "v" on the right hand, which makes using these shortcuts more cumbersome. Moreover, the locations of the keys for period and comma not the "usual" ones for the KOY layout.

Performance

The total cost evaluated by the optimizer is composed as the sum of costs from various metrics. The main metrics are

• Key Costs
  How frequent are easy to reach keys used?
• Finger Repeats
  How often are keys used consecutively by the same finger? This is weighted by the fingers' strengths and the direction of the movement.
• Movement Pattern
  How often do "uncomfortable" sequences on the same hand appear? Here, both the employed fingers (and their lengths) as well as the number of crossed rows play a role.

• Finger Balance
  Are the fingers appropriatedly loaded?
• Hand Balance
  Are the hands equally loaded?
• No Handswitch after Unbalancing Key
  The key following a key that draw the hand away from the home position should lie on the other hand.
• No Handswitch in Trigram
  How often are three consecutive keys on the same hand used (and do they contain a direction change)?
• Irregularity
  How often do two uncomfortable bigrams appear consecutively?
• Secondary Bigrams
  How often are the first and third key of a trigram in an uncomfortable constellation?
• In- and Outward Rolls
  How often is there exactly one change of hands in a trigram (this supports a pleasent "rolling" typing rhythm)?

Looking at the various optimization metrics for a German-English corpus, one notices first of all that the "modern" Layouts are able to strongly reduce the number of finger repeats with respect to their predecessor Neo2. The following analyses therefore exclude Neo2 in order to prevent distorting the scales.

The bar chart shows relative costs for the individual metrics with respect to the Noted layout. Positive values (bars pointing upwards) mean higher cost and therefore lower performance while negative values (bars pointing down) mean better performance. The KOY layout is depicted in orange color, Bone in magenta, and Mine in dark blue.

Among the "modern" variants, the Noted layout achieves lowest costs with the two main metrics "Finger Repeats" and "Movement Pattern" (uncomfortable sequences on one hand).

The KOY layout distributes most frequent letters better to well-reachable keys than the other layouts, while, however, compromising finger repeats and uncomfortable sequences on one hand (in large parts due to the shift key as will be seen below).

The KOY layout has fewest trigrams without hand changes, the Mine layout has the most. The Noted layout lies between the two.

Both the Noted and the Bone layouts roll equally to the inside and the outside. The KOY layout tends to roll inwards whereas the Mine layout rolls outwards. Many people favor inwards rolling movements, but this is certainly a point of personal preference.

The overall result for the mixed-language German-Englisch corpus shows the following picture:

Considering the analyses for pure German and English corpora, one observes that the Noted layout performs similarly well in both German and English with a slight preference for German.

For the Mine layout and more clearly for the Bone layout, the tendency to German is stronger. This reaches so far that the Bone layout achieves better performance in German than the KOY layout.

The KOY layout on the other hand shows better performance in the English corpus than in the German one (even better than the Noted layout). It achieves this partly due to the vowel block being better suited for English, as "e" and "a" are located on different fingers on the home-row in contrast to them leading to a finger repeat on the other layouts. Another factor might be that the KOY layout suffers from many finger repeats with the left shift key, which is less frequently used in the English language.

The explicit consideration of the shift key has had a noticable influence on the design of the Noted layout. The same may be said about both the Bone and Mine layouts that were developed with ArneBab's optimizer that also considers the effects of the shift key. The jump in total costs when excluding the effects of the shift keys therefore is not very high for these layouts.

The KOY layout on the other hand has to cope with a rather high number of finger repeats and uncomfortable movements with the left shift key. In the English language sentences starting with "Th" (e.g., "The", "This", "That") lead to a finger repeat with the left shift key (it needs to be held just after the "T" and then the "h" follows immediately). In the German language combinations with "a" (e.g., "Das", "Was", "Dann") and "o" (e.g., "Wo" or "So") lead to uncomfortable movements for the left pinky finger.

Ignoring the effects of the shift key (this can be achieved, for instance, by placing shift on a thumb key), one observes a clear gain for the KOY layout:

A large part of the costs of the "Movement Pattern" metric for Noted (and in the same amount for Mine and Bone) is due to the bigram composed of "period" (or "comma") and "enter" (a line-break). Excluding line-breaks from the analysis (which can be achieved, for instance, by placing "enter" on a thumb key), the effects of moving punctuation symbols by the KOY layout can also be observed by the other layouts:

Even though the Noted layout was not explicitly optimized for thumb keys, it still performs well for such hardware solutions:

Using keyboards with thumb-keys (or corresponding software solutions) one can avert the (negative) effects of the shift and enter keys by placing those on the thumb-keys. Using thumb-shift allows the KOY layout to achieve better performance (see above), whereas using thumb-enter allows Noted, Mine, and Bone to gain similar improvements (see above).

Besides the German layouts of the Neo family, there is a large number of alternate keyboard layouts in the English-speaking community (e.g., on discord or reddit). These are commonly developed without explicit consideration of the shift keys and often also exclude the effects of line-breaks.

Here, a comparison with the Noted layout shall be performed exemplarily with the Canary and Sturdy layouts which are well-regarded in the English-speaking communities.

It is easy to see that both Canary and Sturdy were primarily developed for the English language. Both layouts can not compete with the modern layouts of the Neo family when typing German texts. This holds true in particular when the influence of the shift keys is to be accounted for. For the English corpus on the other hand, both layouts outperform the German layouts (except for KOY, which still performs competitively).