Hands Up

Hands up came to be because I wanted a layout that focuses almost entirely on inrolls and low redirects. Genkey was the perfect tool to get a rough idea for

this, starting from a nrst and hiea homerow it was able to get good columns very quickly, I didn't really handmake a lot of this.

Inevitably this was to the cost of some patterns like cr, fi, pr and gl. It also has higher dsfbs than you might find on other layouts, though keep in mind about 0.8% of this can be attributed to the oe column. was mostly index reordering and getting rid of pnb on pinky, which was something genkey liked a lot but is obviously not good in practice.

With this I got a layout with a lot of inrolls, something which I hadn't really seen anywhere else. Later I did find out that it's only a handful of swaps away from balance-12, a fact I was completely oblivious of until much later.

While redirects are low in total, the ones it has are generally pretty terrible: try typing before on this for example. There are far more weird patterns than I anticipated, and for this reason I wouldn't recommend it over many other layouts currently out there.

What I will say is that having n on consonant hand pinky does show a lot of potential and I will definitely explore this further since it gives very good redirects and inrolls, to the detriment of basically nothing. Hands up with its pinky on index and a semimak-like vowel setup would already be a step at solving some of its current issues for example while keeping the insane inrolls on consonant hand.

Another thing I noticed about hiea homerow layouts is that punctuation is always really nicely accessible, which can be very useful. Something I don't like is how things like . and , can be really far away or on the same fingers as I do all other punct and numbers with, an issue which these layouts don't have.