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Layouts Wiki

Workman

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Finger 123478910
Usage 6.55% (P59)8.20% (P51)10.41% (P27)15.45% (P79)13.37% (P71)12.64% (P41)9.12% (P46)7.03% (P35)
Same Finger Full Scissor Half Scissor Lat. Stretch
Bigram 2.16% (P89) 0.07% (P33) 1.26% (P38) 0.89% (P68)
Skipgram 5.42% (P74) 0.29% (P54) 2.48% (P52) 1.32% (P66)
No Thumbs Left Space Right Space
Weak-ish Redirs. 1.54% (P87) 1.46% (P90) 1.01% (P74)
Weak Redirects 0.86% (P82) 0.41% (P87) 0.41% (P87)
Other Same Finger 23.09% (P86) 15.58% (P88) 15.58% (P88)
Rolls : Alts 2.25 (P91) 2.81 (P84) 1.93 (P82)
2-Roll In : Out 1.10 (P47) 0.91 (P32) 1.28 (P63)
3-Roll In : Out 1.06 (P42) 0.47 (P6) 0.99 (P47)
Author
OJ Bucao
Year
2010
Finger Map
Traditional
Official Website
GitHub
Wikipedia

Workman’s stated goal is to prevent repetitive strain injury. Its primary innovation was challenging the home row-centered design of its predecessors Dvorak and Colemak. OJ Bucao argues that the home row center column should not be given priority, but only the home keys—that is, the keys directly under the resting position of each finger.

Workman’s design philosophy teaches that up and down finger movements are preferable to left and right movements. This leads Workman to have low LSBs (for its era) in exchange for high SFNs, particularly 2u SFBs.

Like Colemak, Workman maintains its QWERTY heritage by keeping ZXCV on the left hand bottom row and minimizing the amount of letters that switch hands compared to QWERTY.

Workman prioritizes balanced hand usage more so than any other layout, achieving a near-perfect 50%/50% ratio.

Install

Section titled “Install”

Kanata is a keyboard remapper that works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

  1. Install Kanata by following “Step 1: Set Up Kanata” in Nova’s Kanata setup guide:

    Step 1: Set Up Kanata (Kanata Guide for Alt Layouts)

  2. Download the Kanata config file for Workman:

    Workman

  3. Make sure you know how to type your computer password using Workman.

  4. Run Kanata with the downloaded config file and make sure the layout works as you expect: 

    kanata --cfg path/to/config.kbd

  5. To have Workman activate whenever your computer starts up, follow the instructions to “Automatically start Kanata”:

    Automatically start Kanata (Kanata Guide for Alt Layouts)