Compound

Compound is basically a 2023 attempt at creating what Dvarf aimed to be, being at least somewhat of a Dvorak derivative. It maintains about the same % usage Dvarf does with Dvorak, which can be increased by swapping dk (but which is not encouraged). It keeps the mb alt which I actually really enjoy from Dvorak, has pretty good sfbs, very good sfs for an `oe ui o` layout and besides yo, very good lsbs. Obviously str and nts hurt the Bad Redirects stat quite a bit, but you can get used to those pretty well even though if you haven't used dvorak before this is probably not the best layout.

Learning over time that A: angle mod is pretty great and B: having stuff like w on vowel index top row creates some annoying bigrams with homerow middle, I moved wp to the bottom, which are now also closer to the left because of angle mod (which you should really use! Indexes like this become a bit messy if you don't because stuff like pe, po become much worse of a stretch. Mirroring is also an option if you don't already use Dvorak anyway).

It has lt over something like dtb because otherwise you run into not being able to have a nice bl and ld, it forces mb to be a stretch while making an awful lk impossible. That is, unless you want to put l on homerow and h on bot row which I actually believe to be very good but means I don't get to keep h in its Dvorak position.

I basically went and took Dvarf, and saw what I could change about it following some ideas about layouts I have now. I reordered vowel index and looked at right index, mostly at ways to keep that mb alt that dvorak has. I initially ended up with dtb which has setups with lower sfbs/sfs overall, but eventually went with lt because it means I have less stretches, and less interaction with bot row overall which I think is a plus.

I created an alternative version of this which cycles vfkq, having k up in the corner of right index but getting rid of the tv sfb and trading fs for vs, overall improving sfs quite a bit. This is an option if you don't mind that Dvorak f position as much. As pointed out there are also versions with dtb, but these ended up working much better with swapped indexes, i.e. flhm with vowels and then a ck alt on consonant index, but those didn't resemble the original enough for my taste.

Really do think this is solid as a Dvarf followup. I think ld`/`bl on Dvarf aren't great, and lk isn't as altable as I wish it was. While I actually think Dvarf holds up very well considering my experience at the time, I think this is a nice and well-deserved improvement over it. Definitely a solid pickup if you use Dvorak now and want to move to something else that's solid with a smaller learning curve.

There are two things I want to point out though: as this is a mirror of what layouts usually look like, yo is much more of a stretch than if you were to have vowels on the right due to keyboard stagger, and because I wanted to keep some Dvorak similarity I used `oe ui a` which I believe to be slightly inferior to `oa ue i` (though this is still very much a viable setup). I believe the layout to be objectively better when mirrored with `oa ue i` vowels, but as I had different goals from usual for this layout, I didn't end up actually implementing these changes.