ETNI is a minimal-change alternative keyboard layout designed to provide a considerable ergonomic improvement over Qwerty, for the smallest possible effort of relearning.
It is aimed at people who realise the Qwerty layout is poorly designed and inefficient, and would like to improve the quality of their typing experience, but don't have the time or inclination to spend the many weeks or months that it takes to transition to one of the more fully optimised layouts. Only seven keys change places relative to Qwerty: six alphabetic keys and the semicolon, making it one of the easiest-to-adopt alternative layouts.
Design Philosophy
Qwerty has very many poor designs elements. Most alternative keyboard layouts aim to fix all these, which tends to result in a wholesale redesign. ETNI is different - it only attempts to fix the most egregious Qwerty misfeatures. Its strength is that it provides an easy introduction to the benefits of alternative layouts - especially for those who are unable to commit the time necessary to learn the more radical redesigns, with the loss of productivity that the transition period brings.
To get the maximum benefit of this layout, a specific technique is recommended: the hands should approach the keyboard at a symmetrically and at a slight angle to the normal. If the index fingers are positioned at the two homing keys, the middle finger will tend to sit on the upper part of the D spot on the left hand, and on the upper part of K on the right, making it easy to type E and I respectively. Similarly, the W, S, L and O keys are all fairly easy for the ring finger with this approach. Consequently, ETNI is not focussed primarily on the home-row, but rather the home zone which covers all the keys that can be comfortably typed from the home position with minimal effort using this technique.
The background colour of each key indicates the finger used that should be used. This more ergonomic technique is called angle mod style or symmetrical finger-assignment, and results in a superior typing experience especially for the bottom row letters. Explicitly: you should use your ring finger for Z, middle finger for X, and index finger for C.
T and N anchors
The anchor keys are the index finger home keys, these usually have small nubbins to aid in touch typing. It is of paramount importance that frequent letters should occupy these spots, but Qwerty assigns them to F (a below average frequency key) and J (one of the rarest keys).
The two most common consonants in English are T and N, but the Qwerty layout places both these keys in extremely poor positions. Not only are they not on the home row, but they require awkward diagonal stretches of the index fingers - up-and-to-the-right for T, down-and-to-the-left for N. Typing either of these keys requires a lateral movement of the whole hand in addition to a finger stretching motion. This movement away from the home row is antithetical to ergonomic and comfortable typing flow, is a cause of typing errors, and is consequently must-fix issue.
ETNI moves T and N to occupy these important anchor positions. You can immediately see the benefit if you look at the finger motions required to type common two letter words that involve them: AN, IN, ON, NO IT, AT, TO. These bigrams also appear frequently in longer words. Just by moving T and N to good positions, a huge number of words that are awkward to type in Qwerty become noticeably easier. Try a few words containing T and/or N in both Qwerty and ETNI to feel the difference, for example TESTING or INTEREST.
R and P switching sides
You may wonder why R also needs to move. The reason is that RT is common bigram and many typist are able to type it quickly even on Qwerty by moving their whole hand up and to the right, and then striking the R and T keys with the middle and index fingers respectively. The new T position makes keeping R in place unviable. However, there is a good and rarely unused home-row position available - the semicolon key - which is a great place for the common consonant R. Also, by having P and R switch sides, it helps to even up Qwerty's left:right hand imbalance (55%:45%), which moves to 52%:48% in ETNI.
The semicolon is moved off its undeserved spot the home row to the Qwerty P position. This allows the awkwardly positioned P key to move the spot that T used to occupy.
What about Minimak, and why not move E?
Unlike most alternative layouts, ETNI does not move E. Although it's the most frequent letter in English, its Qwerty position - on the top row for longest finger - is moderately decent. For a layout with a minimal-changes philosophy like ETNI, there is no need to move E.
Minimak is another layout with similar design goals to ETNI. Minimak has a 4-moves variant which doesn't move N, which in the author's opinion is unsufficient, and an 8-moves variant which is better but requires more keys to move - including E - which makes it harder to learn.
ETNI Pros and Cons
Pros:
+ More comfortable and ergonomic experience for typing a huge number of common words and word patterns, especially those involving T or N.
+ Common letters T, N and R promoted to home row.
+ A minor improvement to same-finger bigrams, such as RT.
+ Gamer-friendly with WASD keys unchanged.
+ Allows users to experience some of the benefits alternative layouts can provide at minimal learning cost.
+ For those who want to move on to a more fully optimised layout, there is a direct migration path to layouts that are based on T and N homing keys. This includes many of the most popular modern alternative layouts including Colemak,
Colemak-DH,
Canary,
Soul,
Niro,
Workman,
Qwickly.
Cons:
- Some infrequent letters continue to occupy undeserved prime spots, notably K.
- Many of the same-finger bigram issues in Qwerty, notably DE and LO, are not resolved.
These drawbacks are the consequence of the minimal-changes design of ETNI.
Try it
The quickest way to try ETNI on Windows is to install AutoHotKey and download this AHK remapper script.
For Linux there is an xmodmap file.
Discuss it
You can discuss ETNI at the /r/KeyboardLayouts on Reddit.