The
Hands Down™
Layout
“and its discontents”

• This home page introduces the basics of the Hands Down™ layouts, a collection of closely related, fully-optimized, high-performance keyboard layouts with a comfortably rolling typing rhythm. Why more than one? Because a layout with uncompromising comfort and performance means it must be tailored to your hands, your texts, and keyboard. I doubt all three of these variables are the same for everyone.

After feedback from many Hands Down users
I'm now actively recommending only
the Hands Down Neu variations.

• More Variations page has related layouts designed for making your transition from QWERTY a bit easier, or to explore other ideas in layout design. 

• The “discontents?” Also on this site you will find my take on several smart keyboard technologies (Combos, Home Row Modifiers, Adaptive Keys, Linger Keys, Semantic Keys) that I've deployed on my keyboards, designed to work seamlessly with the underlying Hands Down layout to further improve typing efficiency and comfort.
  These are not strictly a part of Hands Down, and can be used with any layout, with differing levels of effectiveness. But Hands Down was designed with these smart keyboard features in mind, and I have described some of the ways they work together on my keyboards to improve the typing experience.

• FAQ has answers to many general layout related questions, like:

  • Do we even need another layout?

  • Isn't Colemak or Dvorak the best?

  • Is this, Hands Down, the best layout?

  • Should I Switch to Hands Down?

• Design notes has rambling info about the design ideas and evolution of Hands Down™.

• The Statistics page is for those who must have lots of comparative numbers.
  But remember that a keyboard diet too high in statistics can lead to bloating or hardening of the opinions. Be sure to salt these statistics appropriately.

You might consider the base variation Hands Down Neu if you prefer to keep all the characters in the finger field (like most layouts), if your thumbs are already busy with other tasks (like layers, shift, etc.), you like that wide artisan space bar you just bought on Etsy, or you can't wrap your head around the idea of typing a letter with a thumb (it is weird, at first, and not necessary to get Hands Down levels of comfort). 

• Hands Down Neu works with any keyboard type:

  • standard row-stagger (ANSI/ISO/JIS, a.k.a. slab) ⌨️

  • monoblock ergos like: Ahokore/ Alice /Atreus/ Barobord/ Cornelius/ Dygma/ Enigma36/ Humla/ Kineses/ MS Sculpt/ Reviung/ X-Bows/ Zaphod and more… 

  • split ergonomic or ortholinear keyboard (see above) 👍🏻

  • Reference and Alt are no longer exactly recommended, as Neu has so much more going for it. 

• Hands Down Neu has Native OS support for slabs at the downloads page. There is even an "angle/symmetric mod" for ISO/ANSI/JIS "slab" keyboards proposed in the native Mac bundle on the downloads page.

Hands Down Neu is based on a total rethinking of a keyboard layout (many things are non-standard, including some shift states). 

All Hands Down Neu variations aim to maximize rolling behaviors while eliminating SFBs with full optimization of all glyphs (alphas and symbols). Neu variations' rolling ratio is almost as high as layouts designed specifically for rolling, but with a much higher in:out ratio, and generally much lower SFBs as well. 

Neu is the place to start if you're new to alt layouts, or confused about all the variations possible with Hands Down Neu–works on any keyboard, so it is recommend if you are using a standard row-stagger slab keyboard (⌨️), or a split ergo and you prefer to have modifiers (esp. shift) on a thumb (👍🏻). Neu can stand on its own, without any need for other "Smart Keyboard" features (combos, Adaptive Keys, etc.). As it is the basis for the other variations, if later you want to try a thumb-alpha variation, you can do so without too much retraining.

Design of Neu began shortly after Élan in late 2020 as specs and goals for the multi-lingual Polyglot project were being drafted. Neu was released in early summer of 2021, leveraging a lot of the work that went into Élan and Polyglot, and ultimately succeeded them in the design lineage, with Gold/Silver/Bronze designed alongside as a part of the suite.

A "angle/symmetric mod" for ISO/ANSI/JIS "slab" keyboards is proposed in the native Mac bundle on the downloads page.

Click for details on Hands Down Neu

If you can Ditch the Slab for a more ergonomic keyboard with dedicated thumb keys, and are open to dedicating a thumb to something other than modifiers (or backspace), then you may want to try one of these ultra-performance variations with an alpha on a thumb.

If you are interested in pushing keyboard ergonomics and efficiency to the limit, you might consider one of the variations that put an alpha (or punctuation) characters on the thumb opposite the space. Putting a letter on a thumb helps to balance the load over more fingers, and can greatly reduce the dreaded same-finger bigram (SFB) problem. It is a very compelling argument, but it is not for everyone—it can be devilishly difficult to learn, and may not be faster for everyone. Which letter to put on a thumb is largely a matter of personal preference, but may be strongly influenced by the types of texts you are typing (different languages, coding, etc.), and your preference for the feel of the typing rhythms. 

When integrated with other smart keyboard features (Home Row Modifiers, Combos, Adaptive Keys, Linger Keys, Semantic Keys), these highly-efficient layout variations propose an evolved way of typing, demanding the most of the keyboard controller as the keyboard does more work for you. While these full optimizations take some effort to learn, in my opinion they greatly improve typing efficiency, convenience, most importantly, comfort.

• 👍🏻 Thumbs up variations work with:

  • split ergos like: Arch36/ Bud/ Cleave/ Corne/ Dactyl/ Ergodox/ Ferris/ Fisk/ Iris/ Glove80/ Keyboardio/ Kyria/ Lily58/ Minidox/ Moonlander/ Redox/ Skeletyl/ Sofle/ and more…

  • monoblock ergos like: Ahokore/ Atreus/ Barobord/ Cornelius/ Enigma36/ Humla/ Kineses/ X-Bows/ Zaphod and more…

  • ortholinears like: Candybar Ortho/ Planck/ Preonic/ Technik  and more… 

  • split ortholinears like: Helix/ Levinson/ Naked/ Nyquist/ and more… 

All of the letter-on-thumb variations perform close to each other, statistically, but each has certain advantages that may make one variation more appropriate for some corpora than others. There are so many subtle issues involved in each of these variations that it is impossible for me to say which may be best for you. The variations are presented not as a continuum of good-better–best, but as possibilites that have been evaluated to give you a solid basis from which to build your custom-fit layout. I have simply tried to present the best variation, statistically, based on which letter you choose to put on the thumb opposite the space. 

• Hands Down Gold (Neu-tx),  T on Thumb: Recommended
  T is among the most common letters in many languages, and has a pronounced influence in the construction of syllables. Isolating T on the thumb results in a superb typing rhythm, preserving the syllabic cadence while also delivering unparallelled efficiency and rolling behaviors in English.

• Hands Down Titanium/Rhodium/Vibranium (Neu-rx) R on Thumb: Recommended
  R on thumb reduces pinky use on the left hand, making pinky use more balanced between hands. Like L (Neu-lx), R is also commonly blended with many other consonants, so putting it on the thumb brings the hand use toward the middle. Stats are similar to Hands Down Platinum, with extremely low SFBs and very high rolling like Hands Down Gold, but a feel all its own.

• Hands Down Silver (Neu-nx), N on Thumb: conditionally recommended
  N is among the most common letters in many languages. As with T, isolating N on the thumb results in an excellent balance when typing in many languages, and in multiple languages.

• Hands Down Bronze (Neu-hx) H on Thumb: conditionally recommended
  H is has unique properties in English and some other languages, binding with other letters in very common digraphs (Th, Ch, Sh, Wh, Gh,  Ph), some digraphs being more common than individual letters. Isolating H on the thumb results in the highest rolling quotient of any Hands Down variation, and better rolling than most other layouts. H is among the most suited for putting an alpha on a thumb, H is almost never doubled and double letters are hard to type quickly with the lumbering thumb.

• Hands Down Dash (Neu-ex), E on Thumb: conditionally recommended
  E is the most common letter in English. Isolating E on the thumb results in lower overall finger movement, but also may have the highest cognitive load by interrupt the mental 'chunking' involved in syllable parsing. 

  • Hands Down Dash has the lowest total finger movement of the Neu family, while retaining much of rolling behaviors.

• Hands Down Élan  (Neu-dot) punctuation on thumb: Not exactly recommended
  Period and comma on the thumb mirrors the syllabic 'chunking' of space, and affords an elegant balance suited for symbol-heavy texts (such as coding).

• Hands Down Platinum (Neu-lx) L on Thumb: No longer recommended (See Neu-rx instead)
  L is perhaps the 'stickiest'  consonant in many languages, combining with many letters in consonant clusters. Isolating L on the thumb yields the lowest SFBs of any Hands Down variation.

Hands Down Gold may be ideal if your prose is mostly English, and you want to optimize for a split keyboard with dedicated thumb keys, and are open to the idea of putting an alpha on a thumb, and can make use of Home Row Modifiers or Callum-style one-shot mods. Other "Smart Keyboard" features (combos, Adaptive Keys, Linger Keys, etc.) are totally optional, but Gold takes them very well, for an even smooother typing experience.

Gold is the Hands Down Winner of the medals series based on Neu (with Silver and Bronze), all designed together and released during the Tokyo summer olympics in 2021.

Click for details on Hands Down Gold 

Hands Down Titanium/Rhodium/Vibranium  are closely related variations all with R on the non-space thumb, and possibly best if your prose is a mix of English and other languages. These hardened variations further reduce usage of the index inner column, while also slightly reducing scissoring. Though not strictly necessary, Titanium/Rhodium/Vibranium were designed with the assumption that the other optional "smart keyboard" features would also be deployed, (esp. H-Digraph combos, Adaptive Keys, etc).

Depending on the specific corpus, these may be the most "hardened" of all the Hands Down variations (thus the hard metals names), released in the summer/fall of 2022. 

Click for details on Hands Down Titanium/Rhodium/Vibranium 

Home Row Modifiers: All Hands Down variations were designed from the outset with Home Row Modifiers  (HRMs) in mind. Modifiers, after all, are keys that are pressed (and often held) a lot, and that has a profound impact on the stresses and demands a keyboard makes on the hand and finger's joints. 

• While Home Row mods are at the heart of the Hands Down design philosophy, these layouts do work very well with modifiers on the thumbs, and all of the statistics cited here are based on shift on thumbs.

• If your goal is long duration typing comfort, HRMs can be a great addition to your kit, but they do pose a serious challenge for speed typing. If you're interested in setting typing records,  perhaps thumb or other modifier arrangements (like Callum-style one-shot mods, or putting the mods on hold-tap keys on the bottom row). These work for many, but I ended up with Comma-Magic, and couldn't be happier.

• Comma-Magic leverages the fact that comma always follows an alpha and is always followed by a space (in English), if it is not nestled between numbers, and it never repeats. "Comma Magic" nearly completely dispenses with the need for shift at all.  With Comma-Magic:

  • Tap comma before an alpha for a one shot sticky shift. (deletes the comma, and caps the alpha).

  • Double-tap comma for CAPSWORD.

  • Hold comma for CAPS_LOCK.

  • Comma then space behaves as it always has. You don't even know it's there.

• Some Hands Down variations will also work on keyboards with the modifiers in standard ANSI/ISO/JIS slab keyboard positions on the pinkies (esp. Neu), but I strongly advise that you ditch these slab keyboards–they really are objectively harmful due to the unavoidable ulnar deviation and constant lateral pressure on the weak pinkies (This is why I use splits and HRMs.)

See my earlier comments about home row modifiers here

Combos are two or more keys pressed simultaneously to eliminate finger twisting for shortcuts. My own Hands Down implementations have over 100 combos, making my tiny 34 key keyboards faster, easier, and more comfortable than any keyboard with more keys.

• Functions such as Cut, Copy, Paste, SelectAll, Quit, Close, ScreenGrab, Find, Kill, and many more are all faster and easier than on a traditional keyboard (and all in similar positions to their QWERTY locations, so easy to remember).

• Diacritics are distributed on the layout spatially, in relation to the letters they modify and the position of the modification, so the strokes to get É and Ü, for example,  are clustered around the base glyphs they modify (above, below, thru/replacing, etc.). It makes working in multiple European languages with diacritics, like åéüōç & ðþ as easy but faster than if they were separate keys. I'm still working on this…aiming for a thoroughly polylingual (latinate) variation of Hands Down, called Hands Down Polyglot. This will eventually work with Semantic Keys (see below), to make full unicode character composition (base + diacritic) be platform independent (Mac's dead keys vs, Windows numpad compose, and Unicode's postfix character composition scheme are all different.) One layout, one keyboard, any platform, any language, without modifications to the host computer! A ridiculously idealistic, but tremendously useful design aspiration.

• H digraphs (TH, CH, WH, SH, GH, PH), are so common in English that the first four appear more frequently than individual letters X, J, Q, Z.  l use quick combos for all of these, speeding entry and reducing keystrokes. Thanks to Hands Down's phonotactic foundation, the combos are easy to learn and use (the three most frequent are even on home row), leveraging existing muscle memory (a phantom H on the middle finger, combines with the leading consonant, to form a combo of neighboring fingers).
  The impact of the H digraph combos is huge: If it were a letter on its own, the TH digraph would be the 13th most common letter, occurring more frequently than the individual letters UMFPGWYBVKXJQZ. In fact, some 80% of the H occurrences in English are in these six digraphs†. So counting occurrences of H separately from the six H digraphs, it would be the 20th most frequent letter, with an individual letter frequency similar to V, after GWYB and before the letters VKXJQZ.

• Pronoun Combos, for common structured derivatives like I'm, I've, I'll; We'll, We'd; You've, You'll, You'd; for example, are two key combos that differ only by the pronoun initial letter. They form an easy to remember group of combos that together reduce a good number of keystrokes. (ex. I+L=I'll, Y+L=you'll, W+L=we'll, etc. Shft/CapsLK is honored, as in H digraph combos above). (Just to show how powerful these features are together, linger on these pronoun combos to add 've to the pronoun, like I'd've, or you'll've).

• These combos also respect shift and caps lock states (Shift will capitalize the first letter, caps lock will capitalize all). Technically, while the number of keys pressed is the same, they are all neighbors, so they occur in one motion of one of two fingers, so it reduces the number of keystroke cycles, if not keys pressed, making a more syllabic typing rhythm. 

• 10-Key combos on the number layer allow entering currency, time spans, or even entire equations with one hand, without leaving the layer . ():–~…$¢€¥£% plus excel navigation (return, tab, esc, numLK, etc.).

• See my earlier comments about combos (a.k.a. chording) here.

Change the rules with Adaptive Keys, like Captain Kirk did with the Kobayashi Maru–

Adaptive Keys alter the characters sent based on the sequence and speed of keys typed to eliminate awkward fingering sequences. When typed quickly (usually like rolling), statistically more common letter sequences† are sent. Adaptive Keys can be used to address remaining awkward issues of an otherwise great layout (even the best layouts have something awkward), particularly to eliminate remaining SFBS or to reduce motion on less dextrous fingers that struggle to move to another row (a.k.a. scissoring).

Adaptive Keys are no substitute for a solid layout foundation, and won't salvage a bad layout–a sound base layout is always the first priority. That means a layout with very low SFBs and total movement, with a total finger burden that is distributed according to each finger's abilities (More total burden on index and middle, less on the ring and pinky). After that, the goal is to lower the frequency of scissoring (skipping rows on adjacent fingers), redirects (changing rolling direction), and stretches (between fingers or across the hand) or reaches (esp. for the inner column). Ideally, the rolling characteristics will favor one direction over another (in:out ratio), and be balanced between the hands.  

Once again, Hands Down's phonotactics make these Adaptive Keys sequences easy to remember, leveraging established muscle memory from the letter's primary location. Neighbor rolls alleviate a row jump/step and/or stretch to the middle column. (You can think of Adaptive Keys as something like macros, or like QMK`s Leader Key, or simplified version of a typing accelerator such as Type Expander.) 

I have deployed Adaptive Keys for three primary situations (that plague all layouts to varying degrees):

•  SFBs: While SFBs are already extremely low on all Hands Down variations, remaining SFBs can be reduced even further, by pulling the next letter to a neighbor finger rather than on the same finger:

  • AH produces AU. AU is a higher SFB than AO in English, so many alternating layouts striving for low SFBs will pair EU and AO. But not all SFBs are created equal: the SFB gain with EU and AO is small, and the inward rolling facilitated with EA and OU (and even OA) reduces redirects and optimizes rolling comfort for the more common scenario in English. It is easier to recover the SFB hit than it is to eliminate the redirect and reclaim the rolling behavior. 

    • Now, if the "pinballing" (redirects) doesn't bother you, then simply swap the O<->U for the lower SFB with the vowel stack AO/EU.  You'll have wickedly low SFBs without Adaptive Keys, for only a small degredation in the smooth inward rolling. I've done this, and the "rocking" or "bouncing" is almost enjoyable...It's all up to you.

  • UH sends UA, and EH sends EO, eliminating the SFBs entirely. This means "guard that gauge!" would be typed "guhrd that gahge!" or "people" would be typed "pehple" while preserving the optimization for the much more common rolling sequences, like "A goat would as easily eat a board instead of bread as you would break bread and eat a heated gourd." 

  • 🇫🇷 🇧🇪The influential Deutch Bauhaus Bureau fictif de Lettrés beaucoup, notes that AU is very common in French and German, and in loanwords in English (AU more common in German, not quite as common as EU or UE in French, which presents a serious problem for layouts that chose to put E&U on the same finger). Adaptive Keys for AU offers a solution with no downsides—right on home row where it belongs. So, typing bureae yields bureau. If you work for BAE, just type the same letters a tiny fraction slower, like we often do for initialisms, because we don't think of them as words...You probably won't notice anything, it just works. 

• Scissors: Scissoring is the awkward phenomenon of having one letter on a top or bottom row, and the very next letter on a neighboring finger being a jump over the middle to the opposite row.  Adaptive Keys can eliminate many scissoring situations by "pulling" the next letter to the same row, making it a comfortable roll instead of an awkward scissor:

  •  GM becomes Gl, PM is Pl, using the same finger for L, but without the row jump. 

• Stretches: Stretching occur across the palm between the middle (or ring) and index when reaching for the inner column.  Recognizing that the entire hand is already displaced to reach that inner column, Adaptive Keys can move the next letter to be under the repositioned hand so the neighbor key is struck by the same fingers but in different locations, reducing the split and total distance traveled without increasing the total motion or needing any different muscle memory:

  • VP is VL & PV is LV, BT is BL & TB is LB. 

• More elaborate uses for Adaptive Keys are possible, too:

  • Rolling tc for tch for example (since ~85% of tc occurrences are in tch†).

  • Rolling ./ sends .com. My implementation of Adaptive Keys also respects Shft/CapsLK states, like the combos, above.

  • JG bigram itself is nearly absent in English, so I use that as a shortcut for JPG.

• Adaptive Keys rolling speed is configurable, and can be turned off on the keyboard. (for gaming, or speed typing tests). Ideally, since Adaptive Keys' primary use is to eliminate SFBs and scissors, the adaptive threshold will be about the same time it would take you to hit an SFB or to reach for another key on a different row with a neighboring finger. This will likely vary a small bit by individual (and finger). My settings are very fast, so Adaptive Keys triggers only when I'm really immersed in my thoughts and typing to get my thoughts out quickly. 

† Using Peter Norvig's Mayzner inspired Google English corpus, in addition to my own private corpus of hundreds of pages that reflects a year of my own typing habits.

Linger Keys: Holding a key for just a bit (about as long as a "tapping term") triggers additional functionality. 

• The most common is Q. Pressed once, and you get Qu (hold with shift for Qu, capsLk for QU), but hold a bit and the U is deleted, leaving just Q for things like QMK. 

• Linger on paired symbols (, {, [, ", to get its mate ", ], }, ). 

  • lingering on a single ' or double " quote will replace the straight quote with the L-R pair and place the insertion point between, like this ‘|’ or this “|”. 

  • And, since these smart quotes may have different keystrokes on a different host OS, the paired quote characterse are processed via the Semantic Keys (see below) for host platform independence.

• Linger Keys can be triggered by any keystroke or combo,  like my linger combo for Japan to get Japanese, or my combo for there, when lingered, is there's , and so on. 

• Linger Keys are similar to QMK hold tap or ZMK hold tap behavior but not quite. The actual linger behavior offers a bit more fluid feedback and control of the effects, which I find more effective and intuitive.  They send a keycode immediately on press AND do other things if held. However, hold-taps in my ZMK implementations can approximate the net effect of lingers adequately, though without some of the feedback. 

Semantic Keys is designed to offer runtime platform independence to send the appropriate keystroke(s) to the host. 

Navigation shortcuts, (Word left/right, browser back/fwd), are the same keystrokes, regardless of platform. From Undo, Copy, Find, Quit, and ScreenCapture, even typing special characters  ¶ or § are always the same keystrokes, whether via regular keypress, combo, or even as the result of Adaptive Keys. 

Semantic Keys somewhat normalizes the experience using different platforms, improving ergonomics and workflow efficiency, and reducing potentially destructive errors. Switch platforms on the fly with a simple keystroke (no need recompile to make a keyboard fit only for one platform at a time), and the keyboard will remember the last platform used so you can pick up right where you left off. You only need one portable keyboard to be effective when borrowing a computer.

• My QMK repo is the most developed, with nearly 80 defined "Semantic Keys" for platform independance. I use QMK keyboards all the time at my large university, with both Mac and Windows public computers.

• My ZMK repo is not yet "Semantic Keys" ready. Since I only use wireless keyboards with my own MacOS/iOS devices, I've been slow to add this functionality. When I get to it, I'll be implementing it with  mentaldesk's oskey module.

† Using Peter Norvig's Mayzner inspired Google English corpus, in addition to my own private corpus of hundreds of pages that reflects a year of my own typing habits.