What have you done to your keyboard?! Hands Down Promethium on a MacBook

There were a few stickers on the lid, but why does my laptop look like this now? In short, I'm learning to touchtype a non-qwerty layout.

My Japanese MacBook keyboard has 34 stickers for a custom layout

I've been using a UK layout Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for twenty years now. I wrote my PhD thesis on one (using the LaTeX typesetting language), and got a second matching one when I started working as a Post Doc. Sadly Microsoft stopped making them, and the replacement models were never as good. Both of mine are rather worn, but sadly the letter E on one started to fail - so I started looking into alternatives.

DIY Keyboards

Needing a replacement keyboard led me into reading up on split-keyboards, the existence of an entire ecosystem of DIY designs, column vs row stagger, splay, etc. I was drawn to the more minimal designs using layers and chording of multiple keys to work with far fewer keys.

I bought a pre-assembled wired Corne v4 split keyboard on Ali Express shipped from China, and started down this rabbit hole - trying alternative key caps, alternative switches, and alternative layouts. Most wired DIY keyboard designs run  QMK firmware and are often compatible with the Vial software for reprogramming the keyboard. Similarly most Bluetooth wireless DIY keyboards run ZMK firmware with similar capabilities. This makes it easy to try out custom alternatives to Qwerty!

A guiding principle in ergonomic keyboard design is reducing the finger movements to at most one key away from their home position. That means most fingers get three keys (top, home, bottom), with a second inner column for the index finger (making 5 columns per hand), and potentially a second outer column for the pinkie finger (making 6 columns per hand). Likewise three keys per thumb is common. That gives 36 or 42 keys, with 34 keys about the lowest (only two keys per thumb) without drifting into stenography. I've found that I didn't really miss a number row (and have a number pad layout on a layer instead).

Away with Qwerty

It turns out there are loads of alternative layouts, and almost any would be more comfortable to type on than the standard Qwerty layout (circa 1874). Two of the older more mainstream ones for English are Dvorak (1936) and Colemak (2006). Computer based analysis and optimisations are now more readily available (e.g. Cyanophage's Keyboard Layout Stats) - although what metrics to prioritise is far from agreed - resulting in an explosion of new ideas.

Having bought a split-keyboard with thumb keys, after a lot of reading and a little testing, I was drawn to the Hands Down layouts by Alan Reiser - in part as he favours the home-row and bottom-row, rather than the home-row and top-row.  I find this more comfortable.

Specifically I started with what was then the latest layout in this family - the inverted Hands Down Promethium layout (2024) - and tinkered with the punctuation and rarer letter placement. One of the interesting features of this layout is the vi/vim friendly HJKL cursor placement (useful in many other tools and editors like Helix too), and in my tweaks I aimed to accommodate some of the readline/emacs shortcuts too (like B/F for back/forward). Did you know most of the ctrl+letter readline shortcuts work in macOS too?

Learning to touch type

Having settled on a layout (for the medium term at least), I set out to learn to touch type - a departure from the dynamic approach I had with Qwerty using primarily index and middle fingers for letters, pinkie fingers primarily for modifiers like shift, and the hands dancing over each half of the keyboard. I would only glance at the keyboard, and on a good run could get over 85wpm with 95% accuracy.

My progress learning the Hands Down Promethium layout

I have been practising using the browser based Keybr.com, which can emulate many layouts on top of Qwerty. After almost 14 hours over three months and 1000 exercises (on the Corne keyboard), I've yet to unlock all the keys, but my speed is still improving slowly - currently it is about 35wpm. I need to practice more, as I have not been hitting the suggested daily amount.

Hands Down Promethium on a MacBook

Realising that carrying an external keyboard with me isn't very practical for laptop use, I devised a way to remap my Japanese MacBook keyboard in software. This works thanks to the small space bar & extra keys either side (for switching between alpha-numeric and kana input), giving enough thumb keys if we shift the right hand two columns to the right.

My Japanese MacBook keyboard has 34 stickers for a custom layout

The 34 stickers cover the core three-rows-of-five for each hand, and the letter R (left thumb) and space (right thumb). I didn't have stickers for the other thumb keys, backspace and shift. Note in the absence of a sixth column, Q and Z are demoted to the top right (handy for command+Q and command+Z for quit and undo). Typing on this seems reasonably comfortable, but not as nice as a true orthonormal keyboard.

I wrote the remapping as rules for the macOS specific keyboard software Karabiner Elements - so you can try my Hands Down Promethium (Pico mod) on a Japanese Apple Keyboard yourselves. This ought to work with an external Japanese Keyboard too (although currently the rule is restricted to the built-in keyboard only).

Stickers (as in the photo) are optional, but help with placing my hands. These glow in the dark, but the backlit original captions show up like ghosts, so I turned that off. Sadly these stickers are not easy to change, so I've given myself another reason to persevere with learning to touch type this layout. 😅