Recommended Layouts

There is no “best” keyboard layout, just like there is no such thing as the best headphones, best car, or best mattress. Keyboard layouts are all about compromises and trade-offs, and choosing a layout is more often an exercise in comparing weaknesses rather than comparing strengths. In other words, when choosing among well-optimized layouts, the choice often comes down to which of several sets of problems you would rather live with.

The recommendations below are well-known, well-optimized layouts collected based on community input in an open discussion on the AKL Discord. If you have feedback or suggestions, please feel free to join the conversation.

Of course, popularity is an imperfect proxy metric for quality. Just because a layout didn’t make it onto this list doesn’t mean it’s not good, and there are many obscure, unused layouts that are perfectly viable for the right audience.

Overall Picks

Gallium and Graphite

If you are new to alt keyboard layouts, the AKL Discord typically recommends starting with Gallium:

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The main issues with Gallium (and more generally, most layouts with NRTS HAEI home keys) are on the right index, as seen in words such as “happy,” “physics,” and “python.” This might make it unsuitable for people such as physicists and Python programmers. Another issue is the B on the pinky top row, which causes uncomfortable patterns with R and M, as in “broad” and “thumb.”

Graphite is also commonly recommended:

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Gallium and Graphite are very similar to each other, but were developed independently.

The biggest difference between Gallium and Graphite is in punctuation placement. Graphite uses non-standard shift pairs; typing shift+, outputs a question mark ?, not a left angle bracket <. Remapping shift pairs is straightforward with the right software, but some people prefer not to deal with since it adds a layer of complexity to using keyboard shortcuts. Depending on how the layout is implemented, if an app has a shortcut assigned to ctrl+shift+/, you may actually need to press ctrl+shift+, on Graphite to trigger it.

As for the impact of Graphite’s punctuation on typing:

Graphite has lower right pinky use due to putting the most common punctuation, ., on a different finger.
Contractions such as “you’ll” and “we’d” feel different on Graphite; on Gallium, these involve an uncomfortable stretch between the middle and ring fingers—a scissor—whereas on Graphite, they require reaching towards the far center of the keyboard—a lateral stretch.

Gallium and Graphite are designed primarily to perform well across all of the main metrics used in the Alt Keyboard Layouts Discord: same-finger bigrams and skipgrams, scissors, lateral stretches, total redirects, and weak redirects. As such, they is often referred to as “balanced” layouts—their stats are decent across the board, but none are especially good and none are especially bad. The other layouts in the recommendation list tend to be more opinionated, meaning that they aim to sacrifice some of the main metrics for other characteristics. As you get a feel for what you like and don’t like in a layout, you may want to choose a different layout that optimizes for the specific motions you find comfortable.

Pine

Pine (v4) has a similar overall feel to Gallium and Graphite, but without the problems with PHY, BR, and MB:

The main issue with Pine is the high usage on the weaker fingers of the right hand, especially the YI pinky. This leads to uncomfortable patterns in words such as “hey,” “yeah,” and “playing.” This can be a big turnoff for beginners because the right pinky is barely used at all on QWERTY.

Sturdy

Whereas Gallium, Graphite, and Pine v4 tend to alternate hands with each keystroke, Sturdy tends to alternate hands every other keystroke, making it high in 2-rolls:

There is no consensus on whether alternation or rolls is better; it is mainly up to personal preference. If you prefer rolls, you may like Sturdy better than Gallium or Graphite.

Sturdy’s main issue is the placement of K, as it interacts uncomfortably with surrounding keys in words such as “task,” “milk,” and “back.” And in general, Sturdy uses the left ring heavily, so it is not suitable for people with a weak left ring finger.

Sturdy has what is sometimes referred to as a “Whorf index”—named after the iconic 2021 layout that first demonstrated that a low-usage, high-movement index is optimal for minimizing consecutive use of the same finger (same-finger bigrams). While this setup is optimal in the average case, Whorf indexes have pathological edge cases where they get used several times in quick succession, like in the word “copying.”

Canary

Canary is another long-standing recommendation that is high in 2-rolls:

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It is meant to be used with angle mod, an alternate fingering for the left hand bottom row. There is also a variant for use with traditional fingering. This variant can be used with ortholinear and column-staggered keyboards:

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Canary is relatively well-known (as far as obscure alt layouts go) because it was introduced in a tournament with cash prizes on the Monkeytype Discord. It was designed to be a decent layout for a general audience. Its biggest problem is the scissor WR, found in words such as “write” and “wrong.” Aside from specific patterns, the other quirk is that its finger usage distribution is very uneven, with high usage of the left index and right hand while the other left hand fingers are not used much. Due to the uneven usage, there is a high concentration of same-finger skipgrams—two keystrokes by the same finger separated by one keystroke—on the left index, right index, and right middle fingers, which affects speed when typing quickly.

Kuntum and Kuntem

Kuntum is an angle mod layout that is unique in that it has no major problem keys:

Despite its lack of major problems, Kuntum is considered a “niche” layout because of two distinctive quirks:

Kuntum assigns high usage to the left pinky, since T is the most common consonant and TT is a common repeat. In exchange, Kuntum offers low pinky movement, since V and Z are both very uncommon. However, most people are not used to such high pinky usage because the pinkies are so underutilized on QWERTY, making it hard to recommend as a first step into alt layouts.
Unlike Canary, which has different variants for angle mod and traditional fingering, Kuntum requires angle mod. There is no way to “un-angle” Kuntum or adapt Kuntum for ortholinear and column-staggered keyboards. This means that Kuntum can only be used on row-staggered keyboards. (If you’re not sure what kind of keyboard you have, it is almost certainly row-staggered because that is the standard.)

Kuntem modifies Kuntum to further lean into its characteristic combination of high pinky usage and low pinky movement:

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E is by far the most common letter, and to avoid overloading the right pinky, the more common punctuation keys . and , are moved to other fingers. This makes Kuntem a great choice for people with strong pinkies, such as musicians.

Thumb Alpha

Most people press space with only one thumb, meaning the other thumb is completely unused. Because standard keyboards have a wide spacebar that covers both thumbs’ natural resting positions, many people aren’t aware that better utilizing both thumbs is an option. Many enthusiast boards get rid of the large spacebar, putting multiple small keys in its place. A thumb alpha layout is a layout that places a letter on one of these extra thumb keys. This leads to more comfortable movement patterns by opening up more options to arrange the remaining keys. However, adopting a thumb alpha layout comes with downsides:

Because using a thumb alpha layout requires a dedicated, non-standard external keyboard, it won’t be possible to use the same layout when you are away from it, such as when you are traveling with only a laptop. (There are ways around this, such as using wide mod and putting a letter on the right alt or right command key, but this adds an additional learning curve and knock-on effects and doesn’t work if the layout puts a letter on the left thumb and doesn’t mirror well.)
Putting a letter on the thumb takes up a space that could be used for a different thumb key: for example, a modifier key, layer key, or something else such as enter or backspace. You may decide that with all the functions you can assign to the thumb, a dedicated letter key may not be for you.

Night and Dusk-WP

Night is the most commonly recommended thumb alpha layout on the AKL Discord:

Night is heavily optimized for accuracy- and speed-related metrics, especially SFB, SFS, and weak redirects. These patterns are especially impactful when typing quickly—100 WPM and higher—and may not be as relevant for those aiming for a lower speed. Like Sturdy, it has a “Whorf index,” a high-movement index that is optimal in the average case but behaves very poorly in a few edge cases such as “copying,” “wagyu,” and “waypoint.”

Another pain point with Night is the high lateral stretches, mainly from Y and P, including in some very common words such as “you.” The word “people” is especially bad, since it requires the right hand to maintain an uncomfortable stretch between the two Ps.

Dusk-WP, based on Dusk (and generally considered slightly better than Dusk), is another layout with similar design goals:

Night and Dusk-WP are both heavily optimized for accuracy- and speed-related metrics, and they use many of the same columns. The most notable difference is the relative usage of the index and middle fingers on the left hand. Night has higher usage of the left index, whereas Dusk and Dusk-WP use the left middle more.

Like Night, Dusk-WP has a lot of lateral stretches, mostly due to the M in words like “come” and “man.” And the Whorf index is present in Dusk-WP too, though the problem is on the left hand as opposed to the right hand in Night.

Enthium

Enthium is a popular descendant of the Engram and Hands Down™ families of layouts:

It takes cues from both projects and optimizes them into a well-rounded result when evaluated on AKL metrics:

SFBs and SFSs are very low, though 2u SFBs like in “edge,” and “calm,” and “you.” (including the period) are more common than usual for a thumb alpha layout.
Scissors are low based on most common definitions; the main potential issues are BL, as in “black,” and GL as in “glad,” but many people will find these acceptable.
The center columns have very low usage, leading to low total lateral stretches. However, the letters on the pinky outer columns create lateral stretches too, in words such as “with” and “influence,” and these may be uncomfortable for people with smaller hands. Using a contoured keyboard may alleviate these stretches. (The creator of Enthium uses a Glove80.)

Enthium has two features that are relatively rare among AKL-style layouts:

Enthium has exceptionally low top row pinky usage, which is a common request for people with short pinkies but rare on AKL-style layouts.
Enthium also optimizes for programming by placing hjkl in a cluster for Vim (though, whether it makes sense for all of them to be on the same finger is up for interpretation) and moving more punctuation than usual onto the main layer.

The two problems with Enthium are:

High movement right pinky: XSFV on the pinky means lots of same-finger skipgrams: for example, “safe,” “invest,” “favor,” “fixes.”
High weak redirects: Makes it tricky to type words such as “nice,” “decide,” “pants,” “install,” “things,” “size,” and “criticize.” While it is possible to train for muscle independence on the weaker fingers, weak redirects still present a challenge to many typists at high speeds.

Bunya

Bunya has a similar feel to Gallium, but adapted to put S on the thumb, giving it exceptionally low SFB, SFS, scissor bigrams and skipgrams:

Gallium’s main problems are fixed on Bunya: the PHY right index (“physics,” “python”), and MB/ML (“thumb,” “calm”). However, the BR half-scissor (“broad”) remains an issue.

As for drawbacks, SS is a common repeat, making it less than ideal for a thumb key because the thumb is slower than the other fingers. Additionally, Bunya has high lateral stretches, as in the word “you.”

Birdie

For very small keyboards with two keys on the pinky columns, Birdie has a small cult following within the AKL Discord. Like Kuntem, it assigns high usage keys to the pinkies in exchange for low pinky movement; the reduced keyboard form factor and R on the thumb further leans into the movement minimization.

C-

The main issues with Birdie are with SL and BL:

The SL same-finger bigram is also present on Kuntem, but since Birdie is made for column-staggered and ortholinear keyboards, it cannot be alt fingered (pressed with a different finger than usual to avoid using the same finger twice).
Many people will find BL uncomfortable in words such as “able” and “black,” though how uncomfortable it is will depend on the amount of column stagger your specific keyboard has.

Racket

Racket has very low SFB, SFS, and lateral stretches and no major problem keys:

The main downside of Racket is a finger usage distribution that favors the weaker fingers, especially the left ring, more than most other layouts. Additionally, having both S and F on the left pinky may be too much, though this can be solved by swapping F and Q.

Why These?

All of the recommendations above are layouts that originated from the Alt Keyboard Layouts Discord. Over the years, a broad consensus has formed within AKL about what makes a good layout. AKL-style layouts tend to prioritize these metrics, in the following order:

Speed: AKL optimizes aggresively for low same-finger bigrams, meaning the layout should avoid making you use the same finger to press multiple keys in a row. Same-finger bigrams are slower than other kinds of bigrams (that is, a pair of consecutive keystrokes).
Accuracy: Minimizing redirects, especially weak redirects, is the next most important goal. A redirect is a sequence of three keystrokes (a trigram) on the same hand where the direction changes in the middle. A weak redirect is a redirect that does not involve the index or thumb. Weak redirects are more difficult to perform quickly and accurately than other typing motions.
Comfort: Minimizing lateral stretches and scissors, which are generally considered to be uncomfortable, is the third most important goal. A lateral stretch is a left-right stretch to reach a key on the far inner or outer column, whereas a scissor is a far-near stretch to reach between two keys on different rows.

Furthermore, same-finger usage, lateral stretches, and scissors are not only calculated for bigrams (consecutive keystrokes), but also for skipgrams (the first and third keystroke in a three keystroke sequence). These skipgram patterns can be felt starting around 80 WPM.

Downsides of AKL Design

As with any optimization problem, prioritizing some aspects of layout design means compromising on others. The AKL consensus on layout design is not the only valid perspective. In fact, newcomers often find it surprising and counterintuitive since it is so different from more well-known design philosophies, such as those of Dvorak, Colemak, and Workman. Among the wider alt layout community, there are people outside of AKL who disagree with the design principles and believe that some of the areas that AKL deprioritizes should receive more attention:

Finger and Hand Balance

AKL prioritizes avoiding slow, difficult, and uncomfortable finger and hand patterns among sequences of 2 to 4 consecutive keystrokes, but this places tough constraints on adjusting finger and hand balance over in aggregate. Other layouts tend to place a medium to high emphasis on using the left hand and right hand about the same amount, as well as using the stronger index and middle fingers more than the weaker ring and pinky fingers.

AKL-style layouts tend to be less balanced on a long run basis. Many AKL layouts assign more usage to the hand with all the vowels—sometimes drastically so, as in the case of Canary. In addition, AKL always groups the vowels in a block on the middle, ring, and pinky fingers. This minimizes weak redirects, but as a side effect, the vowel-side ring and pinky have relatively high usage. Several of the AKL recommendations disregard traditional finger balance ideals for the consonant side as well: Sturdy and Racket both have high usage consonant-side rings, and high-usage consonant-side pinkies are used on Kuntum, Kuntem, and Birdie.

Healthy typists can train their ring and pinky fingers to handle the higher usage comfortably, but this doesn’t work for everyone. For people who have a chronic injury or can’t accept high ring and pinky usage for other reasons, it is worth considering non-AKL layouts. Most Hands Down™ variants have lower pinky usage than the AKL recommendations—though, the popular Promethium variant has a high-usage, high-movement FSV pinky that would be considered unreasonable by AKL standards.

Another common request is for layouts that minimize pinky movement—this is sometimes measured as pinky off, which is calculated as pinky usage minus pinky home row usage. If high pinky usage is not a problem, consider Kuntum, Kuntem, and Birdie from the top recommendations. But if low pinky usage is required, Colemak, Colemak Mod-DH, and RSTHD are low in both total pinky usage and pinky off. Aptmak’s pinky off is slightly higher, but still low compared to other modern layouts.

Home Row Usage

Many beginners arrive with the understanding that maximizing home row usage should be a given on modern layouts. Dvorak and Colemak, the two best-known alt layouts, have both traditionally used their high home row usage versus QWERTY as a selling point. However, almost all layouts since 2020 place O off the home row, despite the fact that it is the fourth most common letter. The reason this is done is that putting consonants and vowels on the same finger almost always increases SFBs, so stacking the vowels onto three columns (AEI on home row + OU off home row) instead of four (AEIO on home row + U off home row) allows for the consonants to be spread out comfortably over five full fingers rather than having to be mixed in with the vowel columns. As a counterexample, Halmak demonstrates the danger of mixing consonants and vowels: it has over three times the SFBs as the top AKL recommendations.

Among layouts that have optimal home keys (that is, the resting positions of each finger, not including the home row inner columns), Colemak and Colemak Mod-DH are on the recommendations list, though mostly due to their availability as preinstalled layouts. RSTHD and Aptmak attain an even better home key setup by moving E to the thumb, opening up space for a ninth home key letter (H). (Thumb E has fallen out of favor, with modern thumb alpha layouts overwhelmingly preferring R on thumb. Moving R off the main grid doesn’t create enough leeway for a fourth vowel finger, so O is still kicked off the home row.)

Badly Placed Letters

In AKL layouts, there are usually one or two letters that get a spot that is harder to reach than the frequency of the letter would suggest. For example, on Night, P is on the top corner of the inner column, despite it being more common than J and V, which are in better positions:

These suboptimal placements are often required to minimize SFBs and SFSs. They can often be traded off: on Night, simply swapping P and V results in a better P position at the cost of 0.12 percentage points of SFB (a 33% increase) and uncomfortable stretches for PL/LP and PH. However, there may not always be a reasonble swap available. Layouts from outside of AKL typically accept more SFBs and scissors to get medium frequency consonants out of corners.

Multilingual Typing

The AKL Discord is primarily focused on optimizing English language layouts. Because letter frequencies and n-gram patterns vary widely across languages, a layout optimized for English will often be suboptimal for other languages on the same metrics. As an example, K is infrequent in English, so AKL layouts often relegate it to a hard-to-reach corner. However, many words spelled with C in English are spelled with K in German: “can” is kann, “come” is kommen, “cat” is Katze. This means that English-focused layouts which put K in a hard-to-reach position are not suited for typing in German.

Non-AKL Layouts

Colemak: Best Out of the Box

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Colemak is the best option among the layouts that are included with every major operating system. macOS, Linux, and Windows (starting in Windows 11 24H2) all provide the ability to use Colemak without installing additional software. If you frequently use a managed computer (e.g. provided by your school or work) or a device that does not support custom keyboard layouts (e.g. an iPad), Colemak is the best option that you can use across all your devices.

As an older layout, Colemak’s design goals are very different from the other recommendations. It keeps ten letters in their QWERTY positions, only moves E and P to the opposite hand, and mostly maintains QWERTY punctuation. All of this makes it easier to switch from QWERTY. Additionally, Colemak keeps ZXCV in the bottom left to make common keyboard shortcuts for undo, redo, copy, and paste easy to reach.

On the flip side, because Colemak is constrained by many of QWERTY’s design decisions, it is also much less optimized than the other recommendations in this list. Colemak’s two biggest problems are:

High weak redirects, like in “you” and “was,” which negatively affects accuracy at high typing speeds, and
High lateral stretches, including in very common words such as “the” and “here,” which many people find uncomfortable, especially if your hands are on the smaller side.

If you are able to tweak your computer to use custom layouts and willing to commit to something completely different from QWERTY, the other recommendations in this list provide a better overall typing experience.

Colemak Mod-DH: Best Preinstalled on Linux

The popular Colemak mod Colemak Mod-DH aims to fix one of the two major issues with Colemak—namely, the high lateral stretches—by rearranging the letters on the index fingers.

Colemak Mod-DH is available on Linux and any other platform that uses XKeyboardConfig, but on macOS and Windows, it requires additional software to use like the other recommendations on this page.

There is an angle mod version:

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as well as an ortho version for column-staggered and ortholinear keyboards:

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Mod-DH is generally considered an improvement over the original Colemak, making it a good choice for Linux users who don’t want to tinker with XKB. However, if you are willing to tinker, all of the recommendations in the Overall Picks section get even lower lateral stretches while also fixing Colemak’s high weak redirects.

Hands Down™: High In-Rolls and Good Finger Balance

The current recommended layouts in the Hands Down™ community tend to place a strong emphasis on maximizing in-rolls while minimizing out-rolls. This means that same-hand sequences tend to progress towards the center columns more often than towards the outer columns. Furthermore, Hands Down™ layouts are strongly opinionated about hand and finger balance: they maintain roughly equal usage between the left and right hands (excluding thumbs), and they use the stronger index and middle fingers more than the rings and pinkies.

Another unique property of Hands Down™ is that since the creator of Hands Down is multilingual, Hands Down™ layouts may be better than AKL layouts for some languages other than English, particularly Japanese, German, French, and Spanish.

For row-staggered boards, the current recommended Hands Down™ layout is Hands Down™ Neu:

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For split keyboards, the community recommends starting with Promethium:

In exchange for high in-rolls and balanced hand and finger usage, the Hands Down™ recommendations perform worse on three of AKL’s preferred metrics: SFBs, scissors, and weak redirects.

SFBs: The AKL recommendations all have lower SFBs than Neu and Promethium. However, the difference is small in absolute terms: at this level, most consecutive same-finger usage comes from repeat letters rather than two different letters.
Scissors: Neu has the very bad PL scissor, as in “play,” which, as 0.23% of all bigrams, is just by itself multiple times more common than the sum of all scissors on the recommended AKL layouts. (Total full scissors on AKL layouts tend to run between 0.03% and 0.10%.) Promethium gets within two times the normal AKL range, with U' (“you’ll”) and GL (“glad”) being the main issues.
Weak redirects: Both Neu and Promethium perform better than Colemak, but consonant pinky + vowels inevitably leads to higher weak redirects : “hey” and “like” on Neu, “nice” and “decide” on Promethium. AKL’s preferred setup of consonant index + vowels would have these redirects on stronger fingers, making them easier to hit accurately.

In addition, Promethium’s FSV pinky is on the high side for same-finger skipgrams.

The author of Hands Down™ suggests using adaptive keys to fix the issues with high SFBs and scissors—though in practice, most people do not end up implementing them. For example, on Neu, AU (0.10% of all bigrams) is the most common SFB, but it can be fixed with the adaptive key AH. This means that pressing H immediately after A produces “u” instead of “h.” But since the bigram “ah” still has a non-negligible frequency of 0.03%, you need to pause for a brief moment in order to type a word such as “ahead.” Similarly, an adaptive PM is suggested to fix the PL scissor, at the cost of requiring a short pause to type “pm” (0.004%). There are no adaptives, though, for reducing weak redirects, so if weak redirects are a common source of errors for you, you may want to choose a different layout.

Not Recommended

Engram, along with the variant Engrammer which preserves standard shift mappings, is similar to Hands Down™—it has relatively balanced hand usage, deemphasizes the ring and pinky fingers, and prioritizes high in-rolls, but at the expense of high SFBs, scissors, and weak redirects compared to AKL-style layouts. Engram’s main selling point is its low center column usage, achieved by filling the center columns with punctuation:

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However, Engram’s low center column usage is very costly in terms of SFBs, making it hard to recommend—Hands Down™ Neu is better overall among this style of layout. If thumb alpha is an option, Promethium and Enthium both achieve similar results with much less impact on SFBs and scissors.

BEAKL has a unique design goal of minimizing pinky usage to the extreme, even on the home row, but this comes at the cost of 3 to 5 times higher SFBs than other contemporary layouts. However, Hands Down™ demonstrates that it is possible to achieve much lower SFBs while keeping similar properties in regards to balance, finger usage, and rolls—minus the extreme prejudice against pinkies. Generally speaking, as long as your pinkies are healthy, it is worthwhile to train them to handle the levels of usage required by modern layouts.

Dvorak has historically been the most popular alt layout, but it has twice as many SFBs as Colemak, making it tough to recommend as an out-of-the-box option. The high-usage, high-movement right pinky is problematic in common words such as “also,” “less,” and “last.” The left index is even more high-usage and high-movement, sometimes pressing three or more keys in a row as in “pixel,” “hiking,” “skipping.” The only reason it might be worth considering is its excellent positions for HJKL for users of Vim keybindings, which are far better than on Colemak.

Layouts that prioritize similarity to QWERTY, such as CarpalX, Norman and Workman, make too many sacrifices in order to remain similar to QWERTY. Out of this class of layouts, Colemak is both better than the alternatives and available by default on all major operating systems.

Halmak has many issues that make it a non-recommendation. It heavily emphasizes putting the most frequent letters in the most desirable locations. But as a side effect, it pushes several common consonants onto the same fingers as vowels, resulting in high-usage, high-movement pinkies and ring fingers on both sides. The DOK right ring is the worst offender, creating same-finger trigrams in common words like “wood” and “book,” and the other three weak fingers also have abnormally high SFBs and SFSs.

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