Update?

[quunnb]

Any update on the project would be appreciated, even if WIP!

I have the same use case, but for the moment using just the regular ol' thinkpad keyboard, so I'm mostly interested in just the first two layers.

And congrats on coming up with the perfect name for the layout! ;)

[fohrloop]

Hi @quunnb,

I'm delighted to hear that there's interest for this layout! I'm still working on this. I think I have used something around 500-700 hours on this and I'm guessing it's less than 100 hours away from being published (at least some version).

About used methodology

I don't want to bore you with the details, but I'm developing and using a new type of method for scoring layouts. It's based on manually scoring all the possible bigrams (two-key sequences) and then expanding that to trigrams (three-key sequences) using a model. In practice the output will be a long table of all possible trigrams (in form of coordinates on keyboard) and their effort score. That can be then used with the tables of the frequencies of character based trigrams (three symbol sequences, like ones in granite-english-ngrams and granite-finnish-ngrams) to calculate a score of any keyboard layout with a simple multiplication and summation:

layout_score = SUM( effort_i * frequency_i),                i = 1, .... N_trigrams

I've written already 10 parts for a blog series about this (yet to be published), so that anyone can see what has been done and why, and can decide if they like the approach or not. I'm also creating a set of tools which will be available for anyone to use at granite-tools (some of them are pushed there already). With those it should also be possible for anyone with maybe 50 hours of spare time to create their own layout from scratch. Or faster if someone is willing to skip some parts and take my preferences as is. At least ideally.

The current layout outline

I'm using a glove80 keyboard from which I'm planning to use 36 keys like this:

    LEFT           RIGHT

  p r m i i      i i m r p
p p r m i i      i i m r p p
  p r m i i      i i m r p
          t t  t t

Depending on what the optimizer says, I might or might not use the top pinky keys. As for some simple "appetizers" from what's coming, here's the individual key scores look like when a linear model is fitted to the scored bigrams (scaled from 1.0 to 5.0):

That image tells how "difficult" each key is "on average" when used as part of all possible bigrams, as estimated by me (that's not used anywhere as such, as only trigram scores will be used; it's just a way to visualize which keys I'm expecting to be favored by the optimizer). I'm just in the middle of making this scoring even a bit more accurate and scale them all relative to the easiest key, but anyway, it's indicative :)

What's still missing

• Accurate bigram scores (using relative scoring of selected bigram instead of ranks + fitting a model & interpolating)
• Finalizing trigram scores model (I hope I can get this figured out after the bigram scores are good. The model output needs to match expected trigram (relative) scores)
• Create the trigram score table (using the output of the two items above)
• Implementing the layout scoring calculation in Rust for KLO. The method is not tied to KLO but I have otherwise familiarized myself with it and I have the configuration files ready for it, so that's probably a good choice. I'm not familiar with Rust so let's hope this goes easily :D
• Running KLO's optimizer for some time and letting it search for optimal layout(s)
• Comparing the found best layout(s) to other layouts using my scoring logic and corpus. If possible, would be nice to score my layout with my corpus with other analyzers, too.

About schedule

I'm planning to still use a few days on this full time, but then I have to also do something else during my days, so this will continue as a evening/night time and weekend project. I'm hoping to get at least initial layout(s) published Q1/2025. I will be posting also to r/KeyboardLayouts about the granite layout at some point (I'm @fohrloop also there).

Other

using just the regular ol' thinkpad keyboard,

Two considerations: The glove80 does not have row stagger, but the keys form a matrix (or strictly speaking, it's column staggered). Some bigrams or trigrams that feel good on a column staggered / ortholinear keyboard might not be as nice on a row staggered keyboard (and vice versa). Another consideration is that if you would like to directly use the granite layout, hopefully there's a way to do so on a conventional keyboard. The glove80 is fully programmable and I'm assuming I can do any type of changes there, but I'm not so sure about thinkpads 🤔. You probably know what's possible better than I do.

And nice to hear you like the name!