Motivation

As a Canary-ortho user for 14 months and reached about 140 wpm on MonkeyType, its flaws - high SFS and high index workload - start to bother me.

--- Canary Ortho ---

w l y p b  z f o u '
c r s t g  m n e i a
q j v d k  x h / , .  

In particular, I don't vibe with:

• B_D and all the K interaction with B__K (back) leading to 2u SFS.

• That feeling that left index is flying all over the place at high speed.

• High SFS (compared to modern layouts).

• LV, SYS, RL, WR, CL.

Don't get me wrong - Canary-ortho is a decent layout - but I just hope for something better. I decided to try other modern layouts such as Graphite, Gallium, Kuntum, Stronk, and several others, but none of it speaks to me the way that Canary does.

Additionally, my keyboard Piantor Pro (shown below) is a split columnar keyboard with an aggressive pinky stagger and 3 thumb keys on each side, and most popular keyboard layouts were designed for conventional rowstag keyboards.

Eventually, after making several different layouts and not finding the one, I realized what I am looking for may not be possible without having a letter on the thumb key. I started to expriment with thumb Y, I, S, and finally landing on thumb R: Dusk.