[User23]

I like it, but like every other keyboard that I’ve ever seen the modifier keys are in the wrong spot.

As John Napier shows in his masterwork Hands, the hand is created such that the thumb easily and precisely works in opposition to the fingers. The thumb shouldn’t be working alone, it should always be in concert with the fingers. Furthermore, since there are four natural positions for the thumb, there should be four naturally positioned modifier keys under each thumb.

From there two obvious approaches come to mind. One is to stick to a more or less traditional layout with some minor tweaking like you see with existing boards, the only real difference being the location of shift, control, alt, and meta. The other is to go all in on chording. With a total of 8 modifiers where each thumb can reasonably hold down up to two adjacent, there’s enough chording opportunity to have no wrist movement whatsoever. Such a design might resemble a musical instrument far more than a computer keyboard.

[opan]

What do you think of the thumb keys on the Pinky4 keyboard by tamanishi?

https://github.com/tamanishi/Pinky4

Even the leftmost one is about as far over as Alt on a typical keyboard.

[User23]

Looks promising!