I'm typing this with my new ergo keeb right now. Holy fuck it is hard. I cannot seem to be able to hack my brain, I've spent 2 WEEKS desperately trying to learn the first SIX MOST FUCKIN COMMON LETTERS and I'm still completely unable to use them even remotely quickly or reliably. I am completely unable to even break the 70% confidence line on keybr on I,E,S and R despite hours of efforts. Worse, now my accuracy goes steadily down the toilet even if I slow down to a grind in an attempt to improve it.
I fuckin suck at this. It is despair and rage inducing. How the fuck do you manage to even learn new layouts?
I spent almost an hour typing this fuckin message.
But hey at least my keyboard looks awesome.
Edit: it seems using keybr is actually damaging my progress instead of helping. I'm switching to another tool.
Edit2: after a few days on monkeytype I'm up to 17 WPM and 91% accuracy in french, up from 4 WPM and almost negative accuracy. Not great BUT it's still a big win for me. I mostly know my layout now, except for the dev layer. I can only progress from now.
I called it the BYPOK layout 😅
Basically heavily based on BÉPO (especially the home row and most of the top row), with a bit of Colemak sprinkled in, and a few letters shuffled based on frequency in both French and English (French taking precedence in case of conflict).
Bépo's main limitation is that it requires at least a 60% sized keyboard. All French accented letters are directly accessible. That's near but not feasible with a smaller keyboard. So I kept É and À, which are very common, on the main layer and moved the other accented letters below their unaccented counterpart. It's mostly OK because these letters are quite infrequent anyway.
Now that I'm starting to get used to it, it's not a bad layout at all. Some digraphs are a bit inefficient, but 99% of the time it seems fine.
I use an almost pure BÉPO mapping on a 44 key board: https://github.com/TeXitoi/keyseebee#whats-the-layout
Oh, so it is for typing in French?
Yes. With some compromises made for English. I mostly type in English anyway, but communicate exclusively in French at work.
Oh, then may I suggest trying to use the keyboard to chat with someone non-professionally and in french? Hobby blogs or chats? It's habit forming.
I believe any language is fine but you're right, key frequencies are very different.
That explains why I haven't seen it before. I did a lot of keyboard layout research several years ago, but only for the English language. It looks really cool. I love the colors and layout you chose, and the fact that it is basically lacking an enclosure. It's very minimalist.
Thank you :)