Many characteristics have been proposed as significant, for example:
It’s better if fingers have less traveling to do.
It’s better if consecutive taps are done with different fingers or, better yet, different hands.
It’s better if common keys are near the fingers’ natural resting places.
It’s better to avoid stretching and overusing the pinky finger, which is the weakest of the five.
Just an anecdotal experience: I, too, have wrist problems. I have tried touch typing with 10 fingers a couple of times and my problems got worse each time. My experience agrees with the point about the pinky above but many consecutive taps with non-pinky fingers on the same hand also make my wrist problems worse. If traveling less means more of those, I prefer traveling more. (But consecutive taps on different hands are good for me.)
Since many consecutive taps with different fingers on the same hand seem to part of the idea behind all keyboard layouts, I expect the costs of switching from the standard layout to an idiosyncratic one to outweigh the benefits.
For now, I have given up on using all 10 fingers. My current typing system is a 3+1 finger system with a little bit of hawking. I’d like to be able to touch type perfectly but this seems to be quite hard without using 10 fingers. I don’t feel very limited by my typing speed, though.
That’s interesting, because, as you say, I think most layouts assume this prioritisation:
Consecutive taps with different hands > With different fingers on same hand > With same finger
If the middle one there is really bad for you, and if you know some programming, I think you could run the Carpalx code, assign extra (negative?) weight to the “hand runs” parameter and see if it can generate a layout that suits your needs. (I haven’t tried this myself.)
Just an anecdotal experience: I, too, have wrist problems. I have tried touch typing with 10 fingers a couple of times and my problems got worse each time. My experience agrees with the point about the pinky above but many consecutive taps with non-pinky fingers on the same hand also make my wrist problems worse. If traveling less means more of those, I prefer traveling more. (But consecutive taps on different hands are good for me.)
Since many consecutive taps with different fingers on the same hand seem to part of the idea behind all keyboard layouts, I expect the costs of switching from the standard layout to an idiosyncratic one to outweigh the benefits.
For now, I have given up on using all 10 fingers. My current typing system is a 3+1 finger system with a little bit of hawking. I’d like to be able to touch type perfectly but this seems to be quite hard without using 10 fingers. I don’t feel very limited by my typing speed, though.
That’s interesting, because, as you say, I think most layouts assume this prioritisation:
Consecutive taps with different hands > With different fingers on same hand > With same finger
If the middle one there is really bad for you, and if you know some programming, I think you could run the Carpalx code, assign extra (negative?) weight to the “hand runs” parameter and see if it can generate a layout that suits your needs. (I haven’t tried this myself.)
Thanks for this pointer. I might check it out when their website is up again.