So, we've all heard of the myth that QWERTY was made to be inefficient to stop typewriters from jamming. Now, without giving a history lesson because those suck I think this paragraph will be enough to atleast make you question how inefficient QWERTY actually is. And even if it was true, you are probably more inefficent and slower than the layout you are using, though you could do a few modifications that I will mention later. Well, that's kinda strange since we've had typing contests in the 1930s, with both qwerty and dvorak being used. So, if they were so scared of that, why would they have contests for who can type the fastest or have alternative layouts by then? Achtually, the QWERTY layout was an optimization of the ABCDEF layout for certain customers by E. Remington and Sons. And to this day, the fastest typists (english speaking, the chinese are in another level especially because of efficient IME usage and all) mostly all use QWERTY with a few using colemak.

Now many of the "issues" QWERTY has are to do with same finger bigrams (ED and RV are assigned the same finger), though many of these are solved by using a different finger when chording on tradtional row staggered keyboards and the amount of moving your hands have to do, which can be ergonomically bad, I guess. However QWERTY isn't too bad when it comes to finger strength, actually I think dvorak is way more painful than QWERTY. Actually I think the most inefficient parts of QWERTY is to do with punctuation and the use of your right pinkie for a bunch of punctuation, backspace, enter and other stuff (though not everyone uses their pinkie for your ring finger is better at reaching these). By the way, if you don't use your right alt key, I recommend moving your enter key there and moving your backspace to where the enter key is and use your right thumb to access it instead, it's way more comfy and it's easy to get used to, and if you have a split spacebar you can put both on the bottom. It's great, I promise

I type at around 140-150wpm in QWERTY with 130-140wpm in quotes. I've used colemak enough to get to 120wpm with ~110wpm avg on quotes, 60ish wpm in dvorak but I gave up on it since it hurts my right hand because of placements of l and r being on weak fingers, both common letters. It's SFB is also pretty bad, and you need to have good muscle memory to worry about chording or using a different finger for an SFB word because you should learn what letters are assigned to what finger before breaking those rules so unless if dvorak matches your fingers, it is probably not more comfortable than dvorak, if you want to try a layout without much effort because you feel pain, try colemak-dh and use both to slightly even hand usage. However, I don't think dvorak is terrible in all aspects of the dvorak layout, for example, the positioning of punctuation, I think it just makes sense to put common punctuation in more comfortable places.

Now the thing is, using an ortholinear keyboard, QWERTY becomes quite uncomfortable and cluncky, as it has no staggering to use words with SFB as mentioned before, but also because of the common use of the middle rows. On an ortholinear, moving your fingers horizontally is just bad, especially when you have to also move vertically for the t and y keys. And colemak isn't much better either since the d and h keys are there. So I wanted to use colemak-dh, which was way better, yes, but it fucked up with my muscle memory so I decided to just make a custom layout using colemak-dh as my base. Also colemak-dh still had the issue with same finger biagrams. My layout reduces those by around 40% and increases neighbour-finger bigrams (meaning the layout has more rolling, good on an ortholinear), this slightly reduces the finger effort total too. I call this layout ottermak.

I've been daily driving this layout for about a week now, and I am already getting 150wpm bursts and 120wpm avg with nearly 100wpm on quotes. I'm still not completely used to it but I'm pretty close. This has been a lot of fun, taught me a lot about keyboard science (dunno the term for this shenanigans) and most of all it opened my eyes to how ergonomic a traditional board actually is. I still sometimes return to my hhkb on qwerty because I love the feel of topre and I really do think QWERTY isn't bad in a staggered layout.

I think I can finally say... I have become keyboard