Canary keyboard layout
Canary is a 2022 layout made by many of the Alt Keyboard Layouts community’s top designers together, built around a very high share of comfortable rolls.
- Created by
- AKL community
- Alt Keyboard Layouts collaboration
- Year
- 2022
- Released with a Monkeytype tournament
- Finger travel
- −39%
- vs QWERTY
- Home row
- 62%
- of letters, QWERTY 37%
The layout
Canary for standard keyboards, typed with the angle mod, which its optimisation depends on.
On a standard staggered keyboard Canary must be typed with the angle mod: the left hand’s bottom row is struck one finger over. Its creators stress that all of its optimisation depends on it.
How Canary measures
Canary typed on 23,331 words of English and compared with QWERTY.
History
- Jul 2022Released by many of the community’s leading layout designers together, with a typing tournament run in partnership with Monkeytype.
- DesignIt borrows vowels on one hand, L and R on the ring fingers from Semimak, and parts of Colemak-DH, while fixing the redirect in “you”. The name comes from the canary in a coal mine.
Design goal: Very high rolls with few same-finger pairs and redirects and minimal pinky work.
Pros
- Roll-heavy: its creators report rolls in over 55% of three-letter sequences.
- Light pinkies, with almost no same-finger pairs on them.
- The apostrophe keeps its QWERTY place, and installers exist for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Cons
- Its optimisation depends entirely on the angle mod on standard keyboards.
- The right hand does noticeably more of the work.
- Punctuation is shuffled and Z moves to the top row.
Canary compared
Against QWERTY and other modern optimised layouts, ranked by finger travel per 1,000 words.
| Layout | Finger travel | vs QWERTY | Home row | Same finger | Alternation | Left hand |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graphite | 72.0 m | −45% | 67% | 0.9% | 66% | 48% |
| Hands Down Neu | 75.3 m | −42% | 65% | 1.0% | 68% | 51% |
| Semimak | 75.3 m | −42% | 64% | 0.9% | 64% | 47% |
| Sturdy | 76.1 m | −41% | 63% | 1.0% | 61% | 44% |
| Engram | 77.8 m | −40% | 58% | 2.9% | 64% | 51% |
| Recurva | 79.6 m | −39% | 61% | 1.1% | 63% | 46% |
| CanaryTHIS PAGE | 79.6 m | −39% | 62% | 0.9% | 60% | 44% |
| QWERTY | 130.0 m | — | 37% | 6.5% | 55% | 57% |
Canary was made by many of the Alt Keyboard Layouts community’s leading designers together and released in July 2022.
It moves your fingers less. On 23,331 words of English, finger travel was −39% against QWERTY, 62% of letters landed on the home row against QWERTY’s 37%, and same-finger pairs were 0.9% against 6.5%. Less movement does not guarantee more speed, and switching takes weeks of practice.
On a standard staggered keyboard Canary must be typed with the angle mod: the left hand’s bottom row is struck one finger over. Its creators stress that all of its optimisation depends on it.
Yes. Choose Canary as your keyboard layout and the on-screen keyboard and hands show where every key is.