Design

Night

DTMK Index

The primary focuses of Night are great statistics (extremely low SFBs and SFSs) and focused finger usage.

Night specifies high index usage - the most dexterous finger. The most common consonant came to be T (akin to Colemak). Of the letter pairings, DTMK makes use of this most effectively. DTMK allows for great stats while not requiring the usage of corner index keys.

The addition of D and M makes up two other high-frequency positions. K takes up the third slot as a low usage letter. This keeps finger movement reasonable.

The employment of M in the central column was done to reduce finger travel distance. Modifications are possible.

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LHJ Middle

Traditionally, R is paired with L. H is, in fact, the better pairing, and thus is placed as such.

A common column to see in this setup is LHM; however, this confers 2uSFSs and a good deal of movement.

By simply omitting the M, these issues are resolved. J fills the last slot, keeping the movement low along with near 0%SFBs.

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FSV Ring

Using S on the pinky is one of the most common homerow setups. However, SS is rather frequent.

By placing S on the ring instead, we avoid the pinky handling these repeats.

F and V both are relatively low frequency and pair almost perfectly with S and one another, making them well suitable for filling the remaining positions.

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BNX Pinky

Second only to H in minimal repeats, N serves as a perfect candidate for the pinky.

Paired with B, forming only 0.1%SFBs and low in frequency, BNX completes the setup.

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Vowel Setup / Right Hand

The choice of C on the index is actually rather tenuous. Y is, in most regards, a better alternative. Thus, you can freely swap between the two, depending on which you prefer.

Word lists, as seen in the likes of Monkeytype, have particular biases towards C while remaining generally frequent outside of such.

On the other hand, Y is particularly prevalent in quotes and common speech, mainly due to variations of you. Pick this if you completely avoid speedtyping or word list based typing.

Regardless of which you choose, one or the other should remain on the homerow in order to minimize travel distance. If you would instead like to reduce LSBs, check out the potential Modifications.

The remaining letters are placed according to the least travel distance.

FAQs

Q: Can I use this on an Alice or split(spacebar) rowstagger keyboard?

Absolutely. Due to rowstagger's corner position advantage, use these formats instead:

Traditional

Angle Modded

Negatives

I would love to say there are none, but alas, like any other layout, Night has its flaws.

P stands out as the biggest. P itself is not particularly common, however, a majority of its pairings involve vowels. This leads it to form a decent amount of LSBs. There are some options that you can find in Modifications, but none are perfect.

The second, resolvable this time, is V. In quote heavy corpra, L_V is somewhat frequent due to love. This is the "only significant" scissor (it being a skipgram scissor) that occurs on Night. Luckily, if this is bothersome, simply swap V with Q, then Q with Z.

History | Step-by-step

This section will feature the entire thought process from beginning to end of the design of Night and Nightingale. It will be one long block of text and is not important in understanding the layouts. However, if you plan on developing your own keyboard layout, you may want to consider this.

Chapter 1: PBLD

The design of Night began shortly after the full release of Dusk, and I, reaching 160 WPM (MT 60s) with Stern. Stern is originally designed months before and is my follow-up to Strand (a modification by me to Oxey's Sturdy_thumbn). Although Stern is a nice layout, especially having no corner key uage, the stacks used on Stern are rather high usage. DTK and LHM on ring and middle respectively are not ideal. So, after reaching 160 WPM, I started development on Nightingale. My layout style is almost always high alternation over high roll, and the same can be said for Nightingale. However, I still wanted to maximize same row interactions. I intended to use a LH_ middle from the start (I just personally really like it), thus finding and placing keys that commonly interacted with L on the same row is a priority. The ones I initially settled on were: P: Place, Plan, Play, Help, B: Blow, Black, Blue, Able, etc. D: Would, World, Could, Middle, etc.. Nightingale focused on placing these keys (in relation to L) on the same row to encourage a same-row finger motion - a bigram roll persay. You may notice P being present in the list and F being absent. This is because the original layout, called PBLD, used PNX, BNV, LHJ, DTMK stacks with DTMK being arranged vertically. If you know anything about layout theory, this block has some problems. First, PN is not a great stack. Although very optimized in SFBs, a PN stack suffers in SFSs. Having this on the pinky is an especially bad idea. When I first published this layout, ddn, a very well known layout creator in the AKL discord, suggested to swap the keys around to have a FBLD setup. This fixes the SFSs and shifts P to the right index. At this point, the layout featured an S pinky and N ring, along with a vertically stacked DTMK index. The ideal of a vertically stacked DTMK is purely based upon effort keymaps. D had to be paired close to L, M is more common than K, and thus M is relegated to the bottom index curl position and K into the center column middle position. Although this is a seemingly good setup, it has a hidden problem: M_D. This SFS, although not the most common, is still very unideal. By placing these on the top and bottom row, you create a 2U SFS that is significantly worse than a normal SFS. Thus, the easiest way to fix this, which both Night and Nightingale adopts, is placing M in middle column middle position. This reduces the distance between D and M significantly, and still maintains good distance relations between the other keys (K_D is significantly rarer by more than half). I have to admit, this idea is inspired by Dusk. You sacrifice some traditional key position comfort for movement gains - much more beneficial in this context.

Chapter 2: Nightingale

Nightingale is finalized from ddn's suggestion to have an FBLD layout setup. Nightingale swaps the FS | BN stacks to create BNX | FSV. A small, but significant swap that further optimizes stats and comfort in usage. Next, to avoid FSBs, Nightingale swaps the V and Z keys to create a DTMKV index. You may remember from the previous section I discussed how having corner key usage is not ideal in such a high usage index. I still stand by that; However, this setup does remove all non-index FSBs as well as creating the three dead-key setup on the left hand. The stats hit from this are shown, however, if this no-full scissor setup is important to you, it may be worth the stats loss. Lastly, Nightingale uses a Y index as opposed to a C index. This setup, although just one swap, is actually more ideal compared to the C index Night uses. This is because P_C and W_Y, both common skipgrams, are now aligned instead of being diagonal. This leads to easier sliding (if you use that technique) and just reduces distance by a bit. To this day, I still regard Nightingale as the more interesting layout of the two. The, essentially, removal of FSBs, maximized same row usage, and still extremely low bad redirects makes it a very interesting layout to consider. I did actually use this; Check "My Review" for my thoughts - and why I switched away from it.

Chapter 3: Night

Night is the final iteration of the Night layout family. There are a few others in this family that will be listed in the mods section. The reason I do not directly mention them is due to them simply not performing well compared Night itself. Speaking of which, Night is but a simple swap from Nightingale. Creation of FSV ring, shifting of D, W into the curl positions (and related), C index, and that is about it. Going through each one, FSV is done simply because it provides better stats and I preferred tanking the scissors over more skipgrams. Similarily, the D, W swap into the curl positions is for comfort (especially on Dactyl which I is testing at the time) and, again, I do not mind scissors. Finally, the C index swap, albeit a little mental, is done specifically for English-200 (Monkeytype default corpus). Y is very under represented in the corpus, while C is a little over. This leads to an awkward situation where lateral stretch usage is higher than that of homekey usage. This problem is not present on "everyday typing," but is annoying enough that I decided to move away from it (check the mods section, I used a F index at one point). These three changes, although small, made a big enough difference in the typing experience that I felt they deserved seperate names. Night is the current layout I am using, and what I will use until I hit 200 WPM on MT 60s. Check "My Review" for more details, but this layout is where I likely will stay. There are a few awkward sequences such as people and the layout not being symmetrical in terms of movement, but it is more than good to use, and that is good enough for me.