Why not as many layouts as there are people?

For decades, typing has hurt, and like so many of us, I type for a living. I've had split ergonomic keyboards since 1995, but lately I've needed painkiller or analgesic creams if I'm going to type more than a page an hour...so I bought and built several new keyboards during the Covid summer (like the Kyria I built pictured above, and Gergo, redox, even a redox manuform, and I was among the first 100 to back Keyboardio 01 before that), until I realized the problem was as much with the layout as is was with the physical board. So I tried several well regarded layouts, but they didn't quite work for the kind of texts/languages I use every day. There are so many layouts, some designed with individual's texts in mind, some just theoretical (like the very clever but ultimately unusable Seelpy layouts), but I needed a comfortable general purpose layout that could also work in Japanese, and maybe other languages, without sacrificing English usability at all. 

Other languages and the  K penalty. Almost all of the newer (good stats) layouts banish K to the most unusable places on the keyboard (i.e. MTGAP, OneProduct, Kaehi). This may be no problem in English, but as I frequently type in Japanese, where K is the second most frequent consonant after N, this was a deal breaker. For some reason, Dvorak was not great in Japanese, so I tried to modify Colemak-DH and Workman to make the K work, but it always felt a bit Kludgey, inevitably knocking something else out of whack. And they still demand too much of the index fingers for my comfort. I wanted a layout that was as good as in English as the best of them, yet was still easier to use in Japanese than anything else.  K had to be on the index or middle finger, or at least in a place where I could swap it with another letter to get it into prime real estate without upsetting everything else. 

The result is Hands Down. It's great in English, but due to its phonotactics influenced design perhaps, it does very well in other languages, too (sometimes with minor modification). I use Rōmaji, like 80% of those who type in Japanese, which means QWERTY for most of them. (Only about  11% use the JIS kana layout you see on common GMK MX keycaps, and even fewer among younger generations.) There are some great "high efficiency" layouts for Japanese, like Fujitsu's Oyayubi Shift (親指シフト) or the new and super smart Naginata (薙刀式). Hands Down Alt-tx and Hands Down Alt-nx are certainly no where near these Japanese specific layouts, but they feel amazing for a Rōmaji layout.

They are definitely far better than QWERTY,
but neither worked for my situation

So I began to wonder...

What if Colemak and Dvorak had a baby?

Hands Down aims to continue the evolution in typing comfort for a new generation of keyboards. For months, I tried one layout a week, beginning with ASSET, then Norman, and Workman, and others.  As good as these and other layouts are, I came to feel that they may over emphasize the index finger and the center column of keys, resulting in index finger fatigue for me, or simply have much too much same-finger bigrams (SFB), resulting in awkward motions. Colemak-DH is very good, and reduces the lateral burden on the index finger on standard Colemak, but still has extremely high utilization of the right index finger. These issues don't bother many people, and Colemak-DH and Dvorak are great layouts, but I couldn't make them work for me.

Other languages and the  K penalty. Almost all of the newer (good stats) layouts banish K to the most unusable places on the keyboard (i.e. MTGAP). This may be no problem in English, but as I frequently type in Japanese, where K is the second most frequent consonant after N, this was a deal breaker. For some reason, Dvorak was not great in Japanese, so I tried to modify Colemak-DH and Workman to make the K work, but it always felt a bit Kludgey, inevitably knocking something else out of whack. And they still demand too much of the index fingers for my comfort. I wanted a layout that was as good as in English as the best of them, yet was still easier to use in Japanese than anything else.  K had to be on the index or middle finger, or at least in a place where I could swap it with another letter to get it into prime real estate without upsetting everything else. 

Because no one layout can be
the best for everyone

It really is that simple. Choosing a layout that truly suits you depends on many factors, especially your preference, but also your texts (including languages), your keyboard, and so on. 

I went through dozens of iterations while designing and testing the layouts. I could have just numbered them sequentially, like the BEAKL series (there are more than 35 BEAKLs, and they can vary greatly). But, wouldn't that imply that version 3 was inherently better than version 2? That just isn't the case. (is BEAKL 34 opted better than BEAKLE 27? By what standard?)

Just giving layouts a sequential version number would imply that Hands Down Vibranium (Neu-vx) is the best, because it is the last one I designed. But Gold (Neu-tx) has the best stats overall, in generic English. Why not Bronze (Neu-hx)? It has the best stats in Japanese! But, Silver (Neu-nx) performs the best with my personal test corpus (mixed English 60%, Japanese 20%, code 15%, French 5%. Gold has the letter T on the thumb, which certainly isn't for everyone. Alt-ex has E on the thumb, and the lowest finger movement of any of the layouts I designed, so shouldn't that be the only one you consider? I think most people are using Neu or Reference, because they are deployable on any keyboard, but some like Alt for the really low finger movement, and all these base variations have all the alphas in the alpha field, so they are the easiest to understand. 

I thought it would be most informative to give a unique name to each variation that I thought was good enough to actually use for a while, then describe my studies and experience with it and let you decide which set of factors might suit you best.  

I call them Hands Down variations, rather than separate layouts, because all are variations on a theme, a common design principle–phonotactics. Since they all share a design principle and as much of the same home block as possible, they all feel similar enough that switching between them shouldn't be too difficult. (I designed other layouts based on other principles, and they don't bear a Hands Down name.) Other smart keyboard features I've developed, like Adaptive Keys, Linger Keys, and Semantic Keys are independent of Hands Down, as they can be adapted to work with any layout–they just work exceptionally well with Hands Down, because Hands Down was designed with these in mind (like the straightforward orientation of the H digraph combos).

Typing on the hands of giants
and out of the mouths of babes?

Hands Down is the result of over 18 months of nearly full-time obsessive analysis. Much of my work, especially the home stretch drafts, has been very much Human and Heuristic rather than Artificial Intelligence. Much of it has also been unabashedly manual, given the manual nature of the task at hand. I've tried countless revisions on my own hands, feeling the motions and observing the mental machinations, in addition to looking at stats. 

But Hands Down is definitely built upon the great work that has gone before, with lots of analysis and comparison of previously layouts, many of them algorithm-built. In a sense, by leveraging prior research, Hands Down is built indirectly with a lot of AI underpinnings, even though much of my work was very manual. Those who are very familiar with the various alternative layouts may easily recognize Hands Down's MTGAP heritage (even if flipped, horizontally, and vertically). MTGAP represents a watershed moment in layout design, and it is easy to see its influence in all Hands Down variations (especially load distribution, and statistics guided choices like the value of hand alternation vs rolls, reach effort vs SFBs, etc.) There are distinct trends in the way language is used that will mean a convergence in high performance layouts is inevitable, and that knowledge has guided my research and design of Hands Down.

Designing a layout is like mining for bitcoin or playing Go

(2.6525286e+32 = 265,252,859,812,191,058,636,308,480,000,000)

You're trying to limit liberties (SFB), and your opponent is the language or sample corpus. With 30 glyphs in question, and 30 places to put them, there are 30!, or two-hundred sixty-five nonillion possible keyboard layouts. Um, a tad more than fingers than you have on two hands... While that's an impossibly large number, most of those possibilities will be much worse than QWERTY. 

Getting this write is why people wright algorithms for it, and I've used some of the tools made available. There are several interesting computational approaches to layout designs. Hands Down originated from a study of Carpalx and MTGAP designs (mostly MTGAP). It is substantially different in several ways, but retains enough to show that it is an evolution of these two breakthrough approaches.  And there are very interesting new analyzers (Genkey), with many tweaked versions, and tweaks to old ones (PatorJ's KLA, Carpalx, etc.), thanks to the opennes of the community, that emerged after the Hands Down work began, which in turn influenced subsequent Hands Down variations. New analyzers offer a chance to examine layouts from new angles, as the Genkey has done for finger speed and new motion metrics with trigraph analysis, (Boo, ISRT, Semimak, Whorf come from this).  Scoring systems on all of theses analyzers are very helpful, but it is important to remember that they are based on (usually very well reasoned) assumptions.

In this process I examined many "high efficiency" layouts, well over a hundred, including the more well-known Colemak-DH,  the CarpalX layouts (QGMLWB), MTGAP and others (like BEAKL family, RSTHD, OneProduct, KAEHI, Soul, etc.). These all have some exceptional qualities of their own. In the course of this study I observed patterns for letter pairings that reduce same-finger bigrams (SFBs). I also studied and tried out many QWERTY derivatives, like ASSET/Minimak/Norman/Workman, but none of them felt like enough of a benefit to justify the switch. Workman was very good, but I still felt an uncomfortable number of awkward SFBs, and it just didn't click with Japanese. That led me to develop my first layout design, Notarise, but I literally "felt" that I was missing something. What began with an analysis of a 33k corpus of academic (my master's thesis) and a number of others (SAT words, short stories, and some multi-lingual texts), then evolved through dozens of iterations using PatorJ's, SteveP's, Den's, kla.keyboard-design.com and the Colemak-DH (bigram) analyzers, and countless hand built spreadsheets with data from other corpus analysis like Peter Norvig's amazing work on the 743 trillion word Google English dataset, among many, many other sources.  (see my comments about these analyzers here). 

Phonotactics Influenced Design: No doubt there will be other interesting designs, but there does seem to be a rapid convergence around a few basics (which letters can be grouped on a finger), because human phonetic systems all share one feature, they are produced by humans with a common speech apparatus. I had been studying linguistics in grad school, with special interest in pronunciation, phonetics, and phonotactics (how speech sounds interact). After learning what I could about layout design an statistical measurement, I laid down the basics of Hands Down with attention to how sounds are produced, which letters tend to produce those sounds, and mapping that to the keys on the keyboards almost as though they are teeth in a mouth. This is the domain of phonology, and especially, phonotactics, which I used for the starting point of my Hands Down design. It was surprisingly good, and showed many similarites to algorythmically designed layouts. It needed some tweaking, which was guided by my deep understanding of the many layouts I had studied.

The result of all the above obsessive research is Hands Down, the Reference layout and the several variations. Hands Down is great in English, but due to its phonotactics influenced design perhaps, it does very well in other languages, too (sometimes with minor modification). I use Rōmaji, like 80% of those who type in Japanese, which means QWERTY for most of them. (Less than 11% of native Japanese speakers use the JIS kana layout you see on common GMK MX keycaps, and even fewer among younger generations.) There are some great "high efficiency" layouts for Japanese, like Fujitsu's Oyayubi Shift (親指シフト) or the new and super smart Naginata (薙刀式). Hands Down Alt-tx and Hands Down Alt-nx are certainly no where near these Japanese specific layouts, but they feel amazing for a Rōmaji layout.

Not at all. It's just a really good alpha layout.

Some may have thought that the add-on features are an integral and necessary part of Hands Down, and amounted to an attempt at a full input method.  It is true Hands Down  was designed anticipating these features, so they do work very well together to improve typing comfort. However, these are technically independent features that can be applied to any layout, so they can't be considered as an Hands Down input method in any real sense.

True input methods, like stenographer's lexicon based input systems (ex. Plover) offer unparalleled input efficiency, they require dedicated machines or sophisticated input method interpreters (typically on the host system), but are much more difficult to learn, and are tied to a given language (with robust workflow dictionaries). There are other input methods, like the very clever Artsey and Taipo that use a system of chorded strokes to efficiently enter individual letters (rather than dictionary dependent phonetic patterns) on one or two-handed keyboards having only 8-12 keys per hand. Artsey/Taipo don't need support on the host, but they do require radically different ways of entering text. These are all true input methods, whereas Hands Down and these add-on features are not.

Rather than invent an entirely new way to enter letters or phonetic patterns (or entire words), these "smart keyboard" features offer a way to significantly enhance performance and comfort of any layout while still using very standard keyboard layout mechanics. The result is a normal high-efficiency layout that can be "overclocked" with these added features for even greater performance. Because I conceived of some of these features as add-ons for Hands Down, they may be particularly suited to deployment on Hands Down alpha topologies. But they are all technically independent of the layout, and can be deployed with any layout on almost any "smart keyboard" with a capable controller for increased performance.

Use what works for you

There are many proven layouts available today, so there is no good reason to perpetuate the QWERTY disaster. If you've never considered any QWERTY alternative, you might start by giving my NOTARISE layout a try, to see if you can learn a new one. It is among the easiest QWERTY alternative layouts to learn, with quite respectable reward for your effort. 

Using Hands Down will save my fingers over 18km/11 miles.
Just let that sink in…
That's like walking a half marathon…on your fingertips…

That's for typing my dissertation, projected to be about 500 pages,
on my tiny split keyboard with Hands Down,
instead of using QWERTY on a standard slab keyboard.

Hands Down is indeed very good, and may be just what you're looking for, but I truly don't think that there is one layout that is better for everyone. If you're already at production level proficiency with another high-efficiency layout, Hands Down may not be worth the retraining for you. 

DISCLAIMER: I'm making no claims, nor making any money here. I am only sharing my research and nothing more contagious than my enthusiasm for stumbling on this configuration of letters on keys during my extensive reseach.  I just wish more viable options were available 30 years ago when I was first developing aching joints, so I thought I share my work. I have no evidence that Hands Down will solve your RSI, or butter your bread. See the legal blurb at the bottom of this page.

Okay, I'm not going to lie…
It takes effort, but it is achievable.

It's about like any exercise program—for about thirty minutes a day, in just a few weeks you could be typing in greater comfort, for the rest of your life. So what if you consider it physical therapy for your fingers? Doesn't seem as hard now, does it? Maybe even important? Your transition will be faster if you can go all in, cold turkey, and not switch back and forth between the layouts. Some people seem to be able to recover their former typing speed on a new layout in just a month or two after switching completely and sticking to a disciplined training program.  It's taken me longer than that, but that's largely because I was designing and changing the layouts every week for months, not only trying to remember where I put that key, but also constantly thinking about how that motion felt compared to another motion, over and over. But one thing is certain, a year later my joints are definitely happier, and I'm chewing much less pain killer.

Learning a new layout is just learning to touch type…again.  

1. COGNITIVE STAGE: Start by building muscle memory of the layout of letters:

You need to memorize the position of letters on the keyboard…

Direct muscle memory training is typically how this is done, but there are things you can do while not at a keyboard that can help.  Take some time to memorize the letter positions. 

• • Doodle a keyboard, write the letter positions until you can do it from memory. 

  • Get some kid alpha blocks, and arrange them like your keyboard.

  • Print a layout of your keyboard on cardstock, and tape it above your monitor.
    Looking up will help to break the habit of looking down to see the keycaps.

  • Imagine typing a word in your mind. Just pick any word you are reading, and try to imagine the motions as you type. This is impossible at first, but after you've been at it for a while, you may be surprised how imaginary typing can produce physical typing sensations, and help your typing speed.

  • Use blank keycaps. Keycaps can help you learn initially, but constantly looking down will limit your speed (to, maybe, ~40 wpm).

  • Typing tutor sites can be helpful for learning basic typing principles, but most are based on the default row-stagger (Slab) QWERTY keyboard, so I don't recommend them for learning an alternative layout. If you want to follow a lesson-by-lesson approach on a typical keyboard, consider these:

    • Typing.com

    • TypingClub.com

…and build muscle memory with practice, practice, practice. 

It's very much like vocabulary acquisition for language learning. Practicing several times a day (like at mealtimes) for shorter periods of time (5–10 min) is more effective than long sessions once a day. These tools drill common bigrams (letter pairs) that help to quickly develop muscle memory. This should help you get to about 40 wpm.

• • Ngram Type (focused practice with high frequency bigrams/trigrams)
    excellent tool for initial muscle memory acquisition.

  •  keybr (next develop speed with greater bigram variety)
    practice until all the letters are green, then move on.

2. ASSOCIATIVE STAGE: Then develop rhythm and accuracy (after all letters/bigrams are learned 40~70 wpm?):

Once you've achieved some consistency with the letter placement  move on to learning hand-eye coordination with longer phrases. If you make a mistake, delete the whole word and type it again, otherwise you'll develop muscle memory for backspacing in the middle of letter pairs. Continue your training with one of these sites, a few times throughout the day for short periods of time. Once you reach about 60 wpm, the keyboard itself should start to feel like a natural part of you.

• • monkeytype (check out Gary Internet's Monkeytype Guide, it`s quite good.)
    If you like MonkeyType, as many do, please consider donating directly to the developer, who has poured a lot of time and effort into this great tool. 

  • ratatype.com (progressive lessons)

3. AUTONOMOUS STAGE: Continue practicing for duration and accuracy (60~90 wpm?):

Hands Down was designed to improve comfort for long-haul typing. With any layout, accuracy and stamina are the practical outcomes of learning touch typing. These tools help build accuracy, and are most effective if you can devote slightly more time for practice each session (10–20 min.), even if you need to do fewer sessions in a day. Focus on whole-word accuracy at modest speeds (~60 wpm, 96%+ accuracy). 

•  problemwords (develop accuracy by focusing on difficult, common words)

•  typelit.io (excellent training for duration typing)

4. Train like an athlete for competitive typing speed if that is your thing (once you break 90~wpm?):

NOBODY types above 100 wpm all day, (except copyists, and they barely remember what they're typing). Research has shown that typing speed is a burst phenomenon, and that both typing speed and accuracy plumet after only about a minute or two. Fast long-duration typists sustain a pace of about 80~100wpm, but training for typing speed both helps for duration effectiveness, and is a fun goal. The fastest typists train a lot, and the specific layout matters far less than the amount of training. Hands Down was designed for long haul comfort, but some people have achieved very respectable speeds, with modest training (a month or two).

• Nitro Type (speed challenges)

• Type Racer (speed challenges)

• Ten Fast Fingers (when you think you're ready to compete)

• 10ff.net (a no frills competition site)

References:

• Check out the r/typing subreddit for a really good tutorial on learning to type. It's worth checking out if you are serious about training to develop solid accuracy and speed.

1. Denise K. Donica, Peter Giroux & Amber Faust (2018) Keyboarding instruction: Comparison of techniques for improved keyboarding skills in elementary students, Journal of Occupational Therapy, Schools, & Early Intervention, 11:4, 396-410, DOI: 10.1080/19411243.2018.1512067

2. McClurg, P.A., & Kercher, L.Z. (1989). Keyboarding Instruction: A Comparison of Five Approaches. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 5, 445 - 458.

3. Aalto University (2018) The traits of fast typists discovered by analyzing 136 million keystrokes, Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180405101720.htm

4. Motonori Yamaguchi, Matthew J. C. Crump, Gordon D. Logan (2012) Speed–Accuracy Trade-Off in Skilled Typewriting: Decomposing the Contributions of Hierarchical Control Loops, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 39, No. 3, 678–699, DOI: 10.1037/a0030512

No...
You will likely not forget QWERTY
Unless you consider technological augmentation a limitation,
then you won't be dysfunctional, either.

but QWERTY has been the worst since 1867…
Just sayin'

Is it rational to maintain an inefficient system just on the off chance that you might need it later, especially if it has been repeatedly proven to be harmful to the user? Do you refuse to use a dishwasher at all because you're afraid you might forget how to wash dishes by hand? Do you refuse to drive a car, because you fear you might forget how to ride a bike? 

 How is your penmanship?

Give that question some sober thought. There was a time, in my lifetime, when handwriting was considered to be a measure of one's education and status, and even now you still need to take notes by hand sometimes, so did you forgo learning to touch type just because you might need to write with a pen on paper now and then? Haven't we all already given up better handwriting in favor of effective typing skills? Why then, have we settled for the worst available typing system? It's absurd, isn't it? That's all luddite reasoning, and it has never been smart. This is very much similar to learning any alternative layout other than the lowest-common-denominator: You will be able to get by, for the rare times when you need to.

Here's another thought...do you like touching all those public keyboards?
They spend all day, right in the fall zone of every users’ breath...I work at a very large public university, and use public computers a lot. My university supplies sanitizer at every computer station for a reason! I'm not personally all that creeped out, but I must say, I do prefer my own keyboard about as much as I prefer my own undies. Sure, someone else's underwear might fit…but eewww!

I have a tiny, portable, split ergonomic keyboard that I keep in my bag (actually, I  have several, but really, you only need one portable keyboard), and it's very similar to my full-time workstation setup. It works on any any computer or tablet, (via USB or Bluetooth), and on any operating system  (thanks to my Semantic Keys). It takes up very little space, has all my comfortable typing behaviors that have greatly reduced my pain, I never have to ask IT for permission to set it up or worry about changing obscure settings myself, and I never worry about slime on a public computer.  I even have Hands Down layouts specifically designed for tablets, Hands Down Touch, Touché. And for those increasingly rare times when I don't have my portable keyboard with me, I just use what's there, like anyone else. I may not be as fast as I once was on QWERTY, but after just a minute or so my lizard brain kicks in, and I can peck out what I need to as fast as the average typist.

The keyboard and layout are the intimate interface between your thoughts and the machine. It should be comfortable for you, and eventually get out of the way.

Even if you don't choose Hands Down,
you can do better than QWERTY.

Most modern operating systems offer support for Dvorak, and some also support Colemak, or Workman. Dvorak  is the oldest of all the noteworthy alternative layouts (See Blickensderfer story), and still much better than QWERTY. While Hands Down does have some similarity to Dvorak (both are alternating layouts), it is quite different and has notably better stats in nearly all areas, I can't say whether switching would be easy, or if the incremental benefits would be worth it for you.  If you're comfortable with Dvorak, Colemak, or any other higher performance layout, Hands Down may not be much improvement for you (you may simply prefer one or the other). There are reasons I personally don't recommend Norman or Workman, and think Hands Down does offer enough benefit to justify switching from these, but your comfort is really the most important thing here. If it is working for you, then you should definitely stick with it.  That same logic may suggest you may want to stick with QWERTY, and honestly, I can't argue against that. I would only encourage you to take a serious look at alternatives, rather than decide by default, because there really is ample evidence to argue that "anything but QWERTY" could be good for you. That's sort of the point of this paragraph, you see, even if it's not Hands Down (or Notarise).

Below is a short-list of the exceptionally "high-performance"※ layouts that I've studied, and can enthusiastically recommend. 

• • • APT v3

    • Gallium

    • IENA

    • MAKs family

    • MTGAP (closest, to Hands Down, in principle)

    • poqtea (really great on ANSI/ISO/JIS keyboards too)

    • RSTHD (E on the thumb, for some excellent characteristics on a split ergo or ortho board.)

    • SNTH (R on the thumb. Truly stunning statistics on a split ergo or ortho board.)

These highly regarded layouts are also worthy of consideration. Many of these have support for standard slabs (ANSI/ISO/JIS) keyboards, and most have well-written descriptions to help you understand how they might work for you:

• • •  BEAKL family (known for light pinky burden)

    • Colemak-DH (Reliable mod of a benchmark layout)

    • CTGAP

    • Engram v2  (light inner column use, better than Halmak)

    • ISRT

    • KAEHI

    • OneProduct

    • UCEIA

    • Semimak

    • STRDY  (great overall metrics, but with a higher ring finger load than I prefer)

    • Soul, etc. (a reasonable QWERTY alternative that works well on ANSI/ISO/JIS)

    • Vukeys

    • Whorf (super low SFBs, with a higher ring finger load)

    • AdNW (Deutsch)† 🇩🇪 (notably better than Neo)

    • adextre (Français)† 🇫🇷 (notably better than Bépo)

Above are only a subset of those I've evaluated and think might have general appeal. It is by no means a list of what I think are the best, because best is a very slippery term.  Many layouts I've evaluated I may not think are suitable for general use, or have sufficient benefit to be recommended, but they may be perfect for the designer's personal objectives. Some are clever and useful but remarkably niche, so they may offer design ideas even if the layout as a whole may not be of general interest. Inevitably, many are simply not good enough to warrant attention, and some are even worse than QWERTY. But all layouts have different features, and will feel different as you type, so it would be good to read a bit about the layout to see if might meet your needs. 

Some of the recommended layouts above are "fully-optimized" meaning that any letter/symbol can be placed on any key. These optimizations could extend beyond typical punctuation to include the number row, and even shifted key values. These layouts generally bear little resemblance to QWERTY and may be harder to learn.

Still looking? 

•  Keyboard-Design.com is a masterpiece of keyboard and layout information by Ian Douglas. There you will find info on over 500 layouts, with statistics and tools and rankings, including the Top 30 list for most common keyboard form factors. This top 30 uses statistics and ranking weight from Ian's own fork of Patrick Gillespie's Keyboard Layout Analyzer (KLA). Other analyzers and sample texts will produce different rankings. (see my notes on analyzers.) There is even a handy layout discovery tool, the Home Row Explorer, that can help you identify a layout by the letters on the home row.

• Here is well thought out discussion of layout design, with a list of high performance layouts. It's a handy list of many good layouts with a stats snapshot of each. You'll want to look for layouts with lower SFBs and Redirects, along with higher Rolls (and Alternates, if alternation is important to you. Hands Down is an alternating layout, and alternators tend to have lower rolling, but Hands Down Reference still has very high rolling, and exceptional statistics across the board–literally. Hands Down Alt and Neu families roll even better!)

• Xah Lee has gathered a ton of random tech related info on his expansive blog, including a lot of interesting keyboard related stuff. He doesn't like Hands Down, but then, he's also misunderstood a lot of things about it. Fair enough! This site has been confusing as it has been evolving with the layout research. Even so, his site has a lot of interesting stuff, and if you're nerdy enough to read this, you may like something you find there.

• Desk Authority also has a lot of keyboard related information.

Your actual keystrokes will vary.

** Colemak-DH and Workman both preserve the QWERTY zxcv locations for their shortcut convenience, but their value is more than that and deserve consideration anyway. Colemak-DH is exceptional, but the very high index finger usage and high hand imbalance gave me paws... After a week's trial, I didn't quite feel the love for Norman then Workman, either, and therefore don't recommend them. It is my opinion that Norman has too much of a hand imbalance, and both Norman and Workman have too many awkward bi-grams, jumps, or stretches, to be worth the effort to learn them. NOTARISE is arguably better than these, in a benefit/effort sense. It requires fewer keys moved from QWERTY for a proportionally greater benefit than either. NOTARISE is not perfect, but it is fairly easy to learn for some good improvement making it far better than QWERTY.

※ I loosely define "high-performance" here to mean very near 1.0 or fewer SFBs based on SteveP's Colemak-DH(mods) analyzer, with default settings for the alpha field on simple matrix beards only.

 † See my comments about the Polyglot project.

A limited but growing number of keycap sets support Hands Down variations.

Drop Coleverak sets have caps that support most, if not all, Hands Down variations. 

• biip, MT3 profile

• dev/tty, MT3 profile

Or you could just practice more so you don't need to look at the keyboard at all. In that case, blanks are great.