In less than a year of using Semimak, I hit 200 words per minute on it. On my previous layouts the highest I had gotten was 160 wpm, so this is a big achievement for me. It also means that I'm the first and only person to have achieved 200 wpm on their own layout!1 Given this milestone, I thought I should write a little bit about my experience getting here and my final thoughts on the layout.
Semimak is a great layout… well, for me at least! This definitely makes sense, given it was designed around problems that I identified with my experience in other layouts, and it was closely modeled around my personal finger dexterity. If there is anything we should be able to agree on in keyboard layouts, it's that what is "good" is entirely subjective. People have different hands. They have different ideas of what is comfortable, and different physical limits. My ring and pinky fingers are more capable than many, while my middle fingers can be considered pretty slow. Therefore, it's likely that my layout won't be the best experience for a lot of people, despite being great for me!
This idea probably could have been communicated better given that in August of 2020, we held a month-long tournament with an $850 prize pool to see who could learn the layout the fastest.2 This likely gave many people the impression that Semimak was the "best layout", despite such a thing, of course, not existing. Be skeptical of anyone who claims their layout to be "objectively" better than other layouts. I will not name names, but if someone claims that their layout has 130% higher "efficiency" than another layout, they probably don't know what they're talking about. And it's not a meaningful metric that you should pay attention to.
To me, Semimak is the best example in proving that layout quality is subjective. I love the layout, and truly think that no other layout currently in existence is better for me. There are several other people who still use and like the layout too - notably, Fenno has over 240 wpm on the layout!3 However, there were many people during the tournament who did not like the layout. It was uncomfortable for them, unintuitive, or physically the layout was just too much from them.
"But the analyzer said it was better than every other layout!" Yeah, of course it did. If you make an analyzer optimize a layout for certain metrics, it's going to do better than other layouts in those metrics. What matters is not how well the layout fits the metrics, it's how well the metrics fit you.
The point of Semimak was to be novel. Based off my own experience, I saw a hole in what kinds of things people and analyzers were looking for in layouts. I wanted to add another way to think about layouts, and I succeeded in doing that by making Semimak. I feel satisfied seeing people talk about dSFB, or same-finger skipgrams so frequently when analyzing layouts these days. My work has definitely had some impact in the community, and I'm happy about that.
Semimak, ultimately, is a proof of concept. It also happens to be a pretty good layout, for the right kind of person.
If you take away anything from this post, it's that Dvorak is the most perfect layout ever created and everybody should switch to it right n