When comparing Maltron Letter Layout vs Carpalx QGMLWY, the Slant community recommends Maltron Letter Layout for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” Maltron Letter Layout is ranked 14th while Carpalx QGMLWY is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Maltron Letter Layout is:
The comma and period are more frequent than KVJZXQ.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Punctuation is also optimized
The comma and period are more frequent than KVJZXQ.
Pro E on the thumb
E is the most used English letter by far at almost 13%.
Pro Highly optimized for frequency of use
This includes di- and tri-graphs, as well as the individual letter frequency.
Pro Easier to learn than QGMLWB
Keeps the ZXCV key in the same place as the very common QWERTY keyboard layout. More familiar than even than QGMLWB.
Pro The layout is basically good for most Latin languages
As vowels and consonants are mostly divided between 2 hands and most words in Latin languages are made of 2-letter (consonant+vowel) syllables, the layout keeps it efficiency not only in English, for which it was primarily created, but in other languages too.
Pro It takes much less effort to type than classical layout
The layout effectively combines not only changing hands methods, and rolling fingers as well, that makes typing a real pleasure.
Pro About the same score on the carplax test as the QGMLWB variant
See the source here.
Cons
Con Requires a physical keyboard
The Maltron layout requires an expensive physical Maltron keyboard. Most layout options are a simple change in software, to remap existing keys. (Touch typists mostly don't look at the labels anyway.) But there's no way to add the required thumb keys for this layout in software.
Con Very unpopular
Even rich on keyboard layouts variety Linux distros like Deepin, offering most of existing layouts, doesn't have this one. The situation on Android is not better, moreover if somebody get used to Swift-like keyboards, that do not have this layout, that person will be forced to have a second (e.g. qwerty) layout in mind.
Con Not always worth trying
The layout is great only if somebody uses it daily and a lot, like journalists, bloggers, writers do. In this case inconvenience to install the layout is worth use it. If you primarily use your phone/tablet to write some comments in Internet and other tiny writing tasks having such an unpopular layout on just your PC/laptop could be not justified.