Sturdy

Sturdy is my attempt at making a layout that has very high rolls while at the same time minimizing redirects, and then bad redirects (defined as any redirect not involving index) especially. I also wanted pinkies to have relatively low usage and finger speed, which this fit perfectly. It was made with the help of my self-made layout analyzer. In fact I'd argue most of the work going into this layout was getting my analyzer to output what I wanted! :)

Because I have an lr left middle column, left index especially picks up a lot of the slack. This is not always good, but the way these indexes are set up now being built around d and y, all sfbs in dy, cyc, dg are actually really close to each other. Especially with angle mod keys and consequently your fingers stay very close to where the action is happening. For reference angle mod moves the 5 bottom left keys one to the left (moving z to qwerty b if you're on ansi), though you keep hitting the same keys with the same finger. n. is relatively common (in optimized layout terms) but can become a very nice alt later down the line.

There are other candidates that I found fit this criteria (high rolls, low redirects), being rnts and stnd. Because stnd requires an rn middle column and rnts has an even higher usage/movement left index than Sturdy, I went with this as the final version.

This is by far my best layout to date. Having used it for a little bit (I'm only 80wpm with it currently, but improving!), the only annoyance I've found is sk. It's somewhat common and just feels pretty bad, going directly against the length of your fingers and forcing left middle to curl inward when you type it.

I have some ideas about fixing this though. You could for example put it on middle and alt it in rk and lk if need be, but that didn't seem super ideal. Another option could be to put it on qwerty b moving z to that position, and alting it in nk and ck. That might actually be viable too, but I'd have to play around with it. If you wanna get really creative, making something like cp which has a near-zero frequency to be sk using something like ahk would also completely prevent this issue. For now I will just tank it which I think is also largely fine because 'somewhat common' still means you'll only get it maybe once every 2 tests or so.

Another small concern is that a lot of words where rl occurs, it is followed by something on the left hand, like in early and world. This has not been a very big deal however, though if you only do monkeytype default wordlist, this layout might not be ideal for you because rl is very overrepresented in there.

One cool thing my analyzer found however, is the ji, pinky with . on index. This gives your right pinky some breathing space (especially when doing quotes you use a lot of punctuation) while at the same time reducing the qwerty l->p pattern in what would otherwise be e.. These struggles then basically get transferred to index which can deal with it a lot better. Sturdy of course has this too.

Wrapping up, for the (current?) price of sk you get balanced pinkies, low movement rings where left ring has no movement at all and right ring has ue, which is always a downwards slide, unproblematic rings and indexes that tank some of the required movement with some minor sfbs in dy, dg, n. and some smaller sfbs like that. From using it so far I can recommend it!