Layout Optimization Best Practices: The Corpus (Part 1)
In this series we are designing our own custom keymaps, logical layouts, you name it. We’ve laid the groundwork by looking into how good/bad QWERTY is, the power of layers (SpaceFN), and also the huge potential of alternative layouts and custom keymaps. Today, we take the first step in designing your ultimate keymap by exploring our options for compiling a corpus. What's a corpus? Essentially, it's just a fancy term for a big chunk of text. In this context it means a usually large collection of textual data used directly or indirectly as an input for our layout optimization algorithms. Often literally a single text file. Why does it matter to you? Because a well-crafted, personalized corpus is crucial for keymap wizards. If you're aiming to design your own custom logical layout, the corpus plays a key role in determining the language statistics that reflect your typing habits, thus the outcome of the optimization. These statistics, which we extract through analysis of...
Aug 19, 2024
Over the course of the last year or so of writing switch reviews of my own, I’ve been integrating more and more data into my descriptions and comparisons of switches. This is seen no more clearly than in the dozens of wiggly-lined graphs, known as ‘Force Curves’, that now sprout up in the dozens on each of my latest reviews. While I’ve managed to avoid dragging the discussion of force curves into any of my short articles on Drop thus far, the increasing use of them throughout my work means I should probably get around to discussing them sometime soon. After all, while I live and die by this kind of information for switches, I fully well understand that I am more obsessed about switches than the vast majority of (admittedly kind of already weird) mechanical keyboard enthusiasts. However, I think that knowing a thing or two about force curves could make a big difference in the hunt for your perfect, endgame switches. So, here’s the quickest and easiest introduction to force curves and how to read them so you can make the most informed switch purchasing decisions. At the absolute most basic level, a ‘force curve’ is a graph that shows you how heavy a switch is at every single stage of it being pressed in and released. Or, rather, it’s simply an objective, graphical representation of how the switch feels in your hand! More specifically, a force curve depiction and what you actually feel when pressing in a switch are the exact same thing - the complex interaction of the spring, the stem, and the leaves of the switch that complete a circuit to register a keystroke in your keyboard. While these force curve diagrams were once upon a time pretty rare to see on vendor’s and manufacturer’s sales pages, they are becoming increasingly more common with new switch manufacturer marketing techniques and a couple of enthusiasts collecting force curves of their own. (See the work from enthusiasts like HaaTa, Pylon, and even my own Force Curve Repository!) Regardless of who made the force curves that you encounter on a sales page or in a data repository, they almost always are displayed in the form of an x vs. y style of graph which plots force or weight (vertical) against displacement or stem travel distance (horizontal) and feature two curves - one for the downstroke of a switch (pushing it in) and one for the upstroke (releasing it). In the event that they aren’t labeled or color coded, the downstroke curve will almost always be the one that is higher up on the graph and can be read as if you were pushing in the switch by looking from the left end of the curve at 0 grams of force (gf) to the right end where it bottoms out, or reaches its maximum force. Here’s an example force curve with some labels to help digest all of that new information: