Keyboard and Keyboard Layout Links

Commented keyboard links that I found to be especially useful or interesting.

Keyboard and Desktop Ergonomics

Alternative keyboard layouts

Layout visualization

Keyboard Layout Editor

Create keyboard layout graphics for your reference or to share.

Strategies in Layout Design

AdNW - Aus der Neo-Welt

General considerations (in German) to find the "perfect" layout. Discusses Dvorak and other approaches and finally introduce the AdNW layout and variants. My layout is heavily influenced and based on that work and the layout optimization software they used.

The Symmetric Typing Project

An approach to using a standard keyboard more ergonomically. My layout builds on these ideas.

Neo

Ideas behind the Neo layout (in German). I favor a different approach, but the information there is still useful and interesting and also contains a good section about correct typography.

Noted Layout

A newer variant in the Neo history. I do not favor he design choices made, but still an interesting read and playing around with the associated web keyboard optimizer can be give some insights.

Neo, Aus der Neo-Welt, KOY: Alternative Tastaturlayouts? Warum?

Four very interesting articles (in German) on why to use alternative keyboard layouts and why and how to potentially develop an own custom layout to match personal preferences.

Layout optimization and similarity to QWERTZ

Super insightful study on how many keys need to be changed from Qwertz to improve the typing experience.
(German version available as well.)

Testing Layouts

Belegungstester - simulating one keyboard layout with another, for German keyboards. For example, simulating on a qwertz layout how it would feel to type with Koy:

Optimizer Software

Extremely useful simulation software with detailed documentation and the possibility to create graphs of the keystroke pattern and efforts. In my opinion still one of the best if not the best options to test or develop keyboard layouts. Here an example illustrating that an optimized layout is much less busy than typing on a qwerty based layout (see top photo). The connection lines show consecutive key presses.

A German version of the software and documentation is available as well.

Frequency tables - a list of character and bigram frequencies for many languages and software to create frequency tables or generate random words from those.

Special Characters - Unicode

Unicodia - nice windows software to search and insert any unicode character, like greek, math chars, typographic correct or special characters (no-break space, non-breaking hyphen...), umlauts or other local characters, arrows and more.

https://www.amp-what.com - online version to search and copy unicode characters, with a good search function.

Switches

Overview / discussion of Kailh switches https://hirosarts.com/blog/different-kailh-switches-guide/