carpalx - keyboard layout optimizer - save your carpals
Carpalx optimizes keyboard layouts to create ones that require less effort and significantly reduced carpal strain!

Have ideas? Tell me.

the best layout

Partially optimized QWKRFY and fully optimized QGMLWY layouts are the last word in easier typing.

the worst layout

A fully anti-optimized TNWMLC layout is a joke and a nightmare. It's also the only keyboard layout that has its own fashion line.

download and explore

Download keyboard layouts, or run the code yourself to explore new layouts. Carpalx is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

layouts

Download and install the layouts.

About Carpalx

Customize Your Keyboard to Reduce Typing Effort

Carpalx is an application that simulates a variety of keyboard layouts to find one that minimizes the effort of typing. The position of any set of keys can be remapped to help lower the impact on joints and wrists. Carpalx can also be used to calculate the typing effort of any keyboard layout and to profile finger and hand usage for a layout.

Effort is lowered by maximizing desirable layout characteristics, such as those that lead to hand-alternation and use of home-row keys. During the layout search, undesirable layout characteristics, such as those that favour low-strength fingers, are avoided. Effort is calculated by considering adjacent 3-letter groups (triads) - this permits penalizing difficult-to-type triads such as ypo, ppi, or ppl while rewarding triads such as dha, fie and sot. The effort model is flexibly parametrized and its complexity can be tuned down; for example, you can calculate effort by considering each key independently. For more details about effort, see Carpalx - Typing Effort.

Triads like "dha", "fie" and "sot" may be easy to type on QWERTY, but harder to type on other layouts. An optimal layout for typing English text does not require that what is easy on QWERTY is easy on the new layout. Frequently typed text, however, must be easier to type than on QWERTY in order for a new layout to be beneficial.

Carpalx can use any text as training input and effort minimization is specific to this text. If a sufficiently representative corpus is used, then the resulting layout can be generalized to other texts of a similar nature. The English training corpus for carpalx is a concatenation of several English books from Project Gutenberg.

keyboards for programmers

The truly dedicated may consider feeding their code into carpalx. By passing in reams of Perl, Ruby or C code, for example, you can maximize two of the three qualities of a programmer.

keyboards for the disabled

If you have misplaced or lost the use of one or more fingers, or even a hand, you may be interested in carpalx layouts which remap unreachable keys, while lowering total effort of typing.

worst keyboard layout

The worst keyboard layout can be deployed as a harmless office prank or as a disciplinary action. Instead of minimizing effort, I asked carpalx to find the keyboard layout which made typing the most difficult.

It burns! It burns!