Chunked Layout Idea

In the Lost room of the Loft, October 25, 2026

A sort of continuation of Orthotyping.

Basically the goal is to get the benefits of chording that Pinchord has, which are that its much easier to write without making ordering mistakes, and if you make a typo, you have a grand undo stroke that undoes the entire mistake, but get this on any keyboard, even a laptop.

Rather than writing in chords, you write in "chunks", which are the same kind of idea. You split the board into "banks", which have a set of keys that correspond to the starting consonants, the middle vowels, or the ending consonants of a word. Rather than pressing all the keys in a bank at once as you do in a chorded system, you press them in order. This gives you more total combos than a chorded layout, which should let you be able to slow down and press fewer keys, that way you can get the order right consistently.

So using the 17 keys qawsedrf ujikolp;, you could allocate say 5, 5, and 7 keys to the starting, vowel, and final banks, or have 5, 5, and 6, and leave a "glue" key, or 6, 5, 6 to make the fingering better.

The goal is to get away from typing words letter-by-letter, just as chording. If you mess up a chunk, you could also have an undo that undoes the last chunk, or the last set of chunks that made up a word.

Without a glue key, you could keep using pairs of (vowel, consonant) to keep typing longer words. This may be a bit annoying, but would leave some more room on the layout. As I learned from Pinchord, most words are pretty small and this doesn't matter too much.

6 keys in a chunk doesn't exactly give you a lot of combos though, as they would be split over 3 fingers, so you basically get 3 choices of 2, 2, and 2 keys, and you can go practically either forward or backwards. So with qawsed, you can choose between:

Or:

And there's some overlap between those, idk what it is. Each of those is 3*3*3, *2 is roughly 50 or so combos before you have to start doubling back and doing something like qweq. Adding that fourth key should give you another 100 or so combos, so you could stick less common things there.

By the way I'm claiming the name "chonk" so you can't have it. Unless there's already a layout called chonk which there probably is.

So the rough idea:
qawsed is the starter chunk, it always starts a new word
rf uj is the vowel chunk
ikolp; is the final chunk, and you can use it with the vowels to make longer words

Like Pinchord, using no vowels could probably be done for briefs. You need a way to undo, for instance.

October 31, 2026

Spoopy new ideas.

I talked in Orthotyping about information density, I think holding down keys could be a good way to get that. I think as long as its used sparingly you shouldn't run into key rollover problems. For instance, holding down a to make things stick or something.

I said here that you could use subsequent pairs of (vowel final) but of course "it" et al. would then be stuck to the previous word! If you were able to hold down the keys that made up the starter, this could be avoided, but I'm not sure that's a good idea.

tgyh are also clearly unused keys. I don't want them to be everywhere, but you could get something from just using them in certain places.