I feel Carpalx has a less arbitrary, more rigorous solution to this [1]. I've been using its QFMLWY for years. It is hugely better than QWERTY. Though as a programmer, I'm still not fully happy with the Ctrl and Shift keys being in their standard location, and thus at the weakest (pinky) finger.
If anyone would like to give QFMLWY a go, let me know. I have scripts to install it on Win, Mac and Ubuntu.
A lot of keyboard layout enthusiasts (including the linked article) make this claim, but is there any evidence for it? As someone who as trained in various arts that use the hand, I've always been told by all of my teachers that the pinky is the strongest finger.
This article rates the first two fingers "very strong" and "strong", while ring and pinky are both "weak", yet a ring/pinky pull-up doesn't seem any more difficult than an index/middle pull-up. Strong enough to lift my body weight, but too weak to press keys on a modern keyboard? I'm skeptical.
The most believable answer I've found so far, as to the relative strength of the fingers, is [1], which is a multi-faceted "it depends". There's no standard way to measure strength, and there are many different kinds of strength a finger can exert. How exactly are we defining "finger strength" for typing, and how are we measuring it?
The Dvorak layout has many advantages (I've been using it for over 25 years myself) but the idea that it's better because it uses your "stronger" fingers is just a canard.
The pinky being the weakest perfectly matches my subjective experience. My wrist pain is at the outside of my wrist. The more I use my pinky, the worse it gets.
That doesn't sound like strength at all to me. Just because it hurts to use a body part doesn't automatically mean the muscles attached to it are weak.
I'm glad to see carpalx was posted! I've been typing in Dvorak for a while, but if I were to try a new layout, this would be the first. If you look into his model parameters, he takes rolling and hand alternation into account [1]. Definitely more rigorous.
One of the disadvantages of the Dvorak layout are the placement of the commonly used ZXCV keys, and he has a layout called QGMLWY where ZXCV are in the same place as QWERTY. I've gotten around the Dvorak issues using mice with several buttons, but it occasionally bugs out, so I'd recommend trying to keep ZXCV in the same place.
If anyone would like to give QFMLWY a go, let me know. I have scripts to install it on Win, Mac and Ubuntu.
[1] http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization