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Terminal Autism (terminalautism@social.076.ne.jp)'s status on Saturday, 26-Nov-2022 09:16:23 JST Terminal Autism
@ryo @charliebrownau @udon It should all be based on a priority system. What are the easiest fingers to type with? Index fingers, because they are strong, long, flexible, and rest on the keys in the home rows that have the bumps and are the easiest to find. So, in Qwerty, the keys with the highest priority are f and j. That is where in a good keyboard layout, the most common letters should go (vowel on the left, consonant on the right). It's also where the most common bindings should go (movement/UI on the left, others on the right).
Since those are the easiest, we can give both of them a value of 1. What are the second easiest keys to press? Maybe the middle finger keys, d and k, so those have a value of 2. What about after that? Maybe s and l, but at this point, those are competing with just moving the index finger (because it's flexible) or even moving the middle finger up (which is easier for it to do than going down, so up has higher priority than down). There may be more than two keys with priorities of 3, but still, some should be more preferable than others. Meanwhile, moving the ring finger down is easier than moving it up. The pinkies are both weak and short, so they should be avoided, and the hardest thing to do is to move the pinkies up (z is easier to press than q, since the pinky is such a short and weak finger).
What about the thumbs? On normal keyboards, they are underused. They are not ideal for typing, but are good for modifiers, and for common actions like space, enter, and backspace. The Keyboardio may use them the best, since it has four long keys, in an arc formation that reflects the movement of the thumbs. They are on a category of their own, since they can't reach the letters, and their movement is lateral and they press things with their sides.
This is the method that you would use to build the perfect key bindings. It's also how you build the perfect keyboard layout. The BEAKL layout ( https://ieants.cc/beakl/beakl.php ) I think has the best principles, including avoiding the pinkies, balancing work between the two hands and alternating between them for typing. So, I think the easiest way is to maybe base your ergonomics for your bindings on their effort grid: https://ieants.cc/images/kb-keyboard_effort_grid_20180712.png
More common actions should be mapped to the keys with the lowest numbers. I should stop now. I just wrote like, 7500 characters, as a reply to a short post about key bindings. Must suppress my power level.