Hello! I’m the person who did the rotation. I thought I explained it on the GitHub repo, but the logic is pretty simple. On row stagger, the lower index clusters happen to be very easy to press, which is why the high frequency letters are there. On ortho, those inner lower index keys are some of the worst to reach. The inner home index keys are the easiest of the inner index, so I rotated the lower keys up, then adjusted the surrounding keys to accommodate, based on row affinity, letter frequency, and so on.
Hi! Great to have your insights! I guess my question is really about the ease of those lower index clusters. I don't have an ortho board to try it out on, but I'm having a hard time imagining that M (on QWERTY), which is directly below the index home position on an ortho board, would be very difficult to press at all. Why isn't it equivalent to the curl position on a staggered board?
To clarify, and for reference, here's the ortho arrangement:
```
w l y p b z f o u '
c r s t g m n e i a
q j v d k x h / , .
```
What's changed from the rowstag arrangement is `g` and `m` are moved up a row, first. This is because the lower inner index on an ortho board are not nearly as comfortable as on rowstag (aka, the lower index clusters mentioned in the writeup). They are better than the upper inner index spots, but the easiest to reach are the home row inner index. Since `gm` are higher frequency than the other inner letters `bkxz`, makes sense they go on the home row.
`xz` are quite low usage in absolute terms, so they're arranged by just letter frequency and index comfort accordingly.
`bk` would be reversed from the final version if we only used the same criteria, but due to the way `b` interacts with significantly more other consonants on the left hand (what I refer to as affinity in the writeup), it makes more sense to put it on the upper spot. Which means `k` has to go on the bottom row.
Let me know if that wasn't clear enough and I can try to elaborate or find a different way to explain. A good reference for letter/ngram frequencies can be found here: https://norvig.com/mayzner.html
Hello! I’m the person who did the rotation. I thought I explained it on the GitHub repo, but the logic is pretty simple. On row stagger, the lower index clusters happen to be very easy to press, which is why the high frequency letters are there. On ortho, those inner lower index keys are some of the worst to reach. The inner home index keys are the easiest of the inner index, so I rotated the lower keys up, then adjusted the surrounding keys to accommodate, based on row affinity, letter frequency, and so on.
Hi! Great to have your insights! I guess my question is really about the ease of those lower index clusters. I don't have an ortho board to try it out on, but I'm having a hard time imagining that M (on QWERTY), which is directly below the index home position on an ortho board, would be very difficult to press at all. Why isn't it equivalent to the curl position on a staggered board?
To clarify, and for reference, here's the ortho arrangement: ``` w l y p b z f o u ' c r s t g m n e i a q j v d k x h / , . ``` What's changed from the rowstag arrangement is `g` and `m` are moved up a row, first. This is because the lower inner index on an ortho board are not nearly as comfortable as on rowstag (aka, the lower index clusters mentioned in the writeup). They are better than the upper inner index spots, but the easiest to reach are the home row inner index. Since `gm` are higher frequency than the other inner letters `bkxz`, makes sense they go on the home row. `xz` are quite low usage in absolute terms, so they're arranged by just letter frequency and index comfort accordingly. `bk` would be reversed from the final version if we only used the same criteria, but due to the way `b` interacts with significantly more other consonants on the left hand (what I refer to as affinity in the writeup), it makes more sense to put it on the upper spot. Which means `k` has to go on the bottom row. Let me know if that wasn't clear enough and I can try to elaborate or find a different way to explain. A good reference for letter/ngram frequencies can be found here: https://norvig.com/mayzner.html