Crest

Crest is a layout I created because I was very impressed by the roll stats of Rollmak and Megamak. I especially thought the homerow was interesting because it seemed to be possible to stay fairly close to Colemak while solving a lot of the redirect issues it has.

This I did not end up doing as Rollmak seemed to fill this role quite nicely. Instead, I tried to build on top of Rollmak and improve what was already there.

My main goal was to keep weird patterns low, sometimes even to the detriment to some finger balance. Besides pinkies, both hand and finger balance were the least of my concerns while making this layout. Redirects I also cared less about, a change of pace from what I usually make. Last but not least is n on vowel index for the rolls that I wanted, curious to how that would work out compared to simply putting it on index.

This might be the most polished layout I have. Besides the redirects with n there is very little I can point to that I don't like. There is wr, but that's about it. Pinkies are good, patterns are good, I'm really happy with the result. There are however 3 pairs that you might want to consider swapping, depending on what you like.

bj is a good swap candidate, I might actually make that the main layout, I'm not entirely sure. b is where it is currently because be and ba would not be great and from here those become slightly easier. This is a rowstag consideration though, on colstag definitely swap those.

The other pair is gw. The current setup allows for a much easier gl than would otherwise be possible, moving some sfbs from index to ring in the process. There is however value in swapping those back, making gl worse but moving sfbs off of ring. I will say though that ring already doesn't have much to do, so a potentially slidable sw is certainly not the end of the world.

Lastly you can consider a ,'w cycle. This gets rid of wr which is great, but does leave you with ' being in a bit of an awkward position, especially in something like you' this could be a problem. Still, it might be something to consider especially if you don't/can't slide e, which is surprisingly common.

Speaking of work, this layout is pretty unbalanced. It's got a 45-55 workload, which means one hand will be working harder than the other, and it's got some interesting finger balances. Left index is about 18% use, while left middle and ring are both about 10%. Right ring is nearing 17% while right middle is about 16%, with index being just over 15%. You might want to consider this before starting out. It shouldn't affect your experience too much, but it's something to keep in mind. If you want to ease up on right ring (to the detriment of right pinky) you can swap . and ;.

In the end you get a layout very similar to Hands Left, something which I'm very happy with. Go try this!