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While I agree in theory, in practice I feel like there is a noticeable difference between the frequency of F1-12 and the punctuation characters OP listed. Moreover, there are not many tools to help people find layer arrangements that are actually ergonomic besides their own intuition. Layers are surprisingly complex and subtle for many reasons here are a few I can think of: - Layer transition fatigue: If you have many layers, it can be difficult to remember which key(s) triggers them. This can be improved with time and practice. In addition, you might want to arrange the symbols on your layers to minimize the amount of layer transitions needed. For example, if you type ./ a lot if would be nice if they were on the same layer and either a roll or an alternation. - Awkward finger patterns: if we go back to the ./ example, if for some reason you decide / must go on another layer, then you probably want / to be close to period. If you design your layer in a way where / ends up under qwerty P, then you’ll have to contort your fingers to make the ./ pattern. This gets way more complicated when you consider all the possible symbol patterns such as ->, =>, :=, </, ./, [i], [j], |>, (“, “), ):, etc… - Unexpected layer transition same finger usage: people will sometimes naively put layer transition keys in suboptimal places. For instance, if you use right thumb for space, then I would argue it’s a bad idea to use another right thumb key for shift. The reason is because in between sentences you put a space after the previous sentence and then press shift to capitalize the next letter. If they space and shift are on the same finger then you will probably find this sequence uncomfortable. A similar logic applies for backspace. I would argue space and backspace should be on the same thumb because they are pretty much mutually exclusive. Also your space thumb is used to repeating, and backspacing often involves a lot of repeating. Overall, I think layers do have a lot of potential to work, but I feel like there aren’t many tools to help people iron out all these subtle issues. I’ve been working on making such a tool, but testing it takes a lot of time due to the first point. |