Keyboard Layout

July 12, 2025

When I switched over from my laptop to a desktop, I had recently seen the youtube video "why is this weird keyboard so good?" by pinguefy, and so I decided to get a Keyboardio Atreus keyboard. This was definitely a fun decision. When my keyboard arrived, I quickly realized I was pretty much unable to type on it: I kept reaching for the h key with my left hand, which you can't do on a split-style keyboard like the Atreus. I was going to have to relearn all of how I typed. And since I'm relearning how to type anyway, I might as well also ditch the QWERTY layout, and relearn completely from scratch.

So, what's the best keyboard layout? There's a lot of layouts, and eventually, I made my way over to the Alternate Keyboard Layouts Discord server to ask. Turns out, they have opinions in there. I ended up with this crazy layout:

Layout

Alpha Layer

"whaarf" layout, by FlareFin and ClemenPine on Discord

f l h k z     : w u q /
s r n t m     y c e i o
x j b d v     g p ; , .
  <space>     a

Design goals:

Take advantage of the other thumb key with a commonly used but not commonly repeated letter.
Reduce the number of same-finger bigrams as much as possible, at the cost of having a couple scissors

Number Layer (by me)

  / - < >     ^ = + * /
1 2 3 4 5     6 7 8 9 0
.   _             ; , .

Design goals:

I don't like numpad shapes; put the numbers in a row
Place symbols that commonly go with numbers on the same layer
In programming, it's common to type +=, *=, /=, ->, <=, etc, so keep these in mind

Symbol Layer (by me)

| @ ↑ $ %       ` { } /
  ← ↓ →       # ~ ( ) &
                  [ ]

Design goals:

I want my arrow keys to be in a d-pad shape. Sorry, hjkl fans.
() and other brackets should be easy to roll.
I just kind of put the rest of the symbols in spots where they fit.

Others

? and ! and \ are on combos.

Story

At first, when I practiced I didn't actually improve. The only difference was that I was getting worse at typing on QWERTY. I got my QWERTY typing speeds all the way down to ~10 wpm before I started getting better at the new layout. After a month of being pretty much unable to type at all, I made it up to ~40 wpm on my new layout, and made the leap. I did get my QWERTY muscle memory back later.