Thanks, I've been looking at this site. QGMLWB seems pretty decent and KDE actually has support for Carpalx layouts already, so switching would be easy.
It's surprising that the layout didn't move more punctuation and symbols around - the Qwerty default positions for the comma and period are surely not optimal (bottom row, ring finger for period). I wonder what results one would get running the same algorithm but allowing these changes as well.
Update for anyone who was curious about that last point: I figured out how to use the simulated annealing software on that website, which allows you to use a custom mask for the characters than can be swapped. On my very first run I got a result better than QGMLWB: in fact QGMLWB requires 2.5% more effort to type the training corpus than the one I generated.
I bet a huge win would be moving the exclamation point, but I haven't figured out how to allow the program to remap shifted keys.
It's surprising that the layout didn't move more punctuation and symbols around - the Qwerty default positions for the comma and period are surely not optimal (bottom row, ring finger for period). I wonder what results one would get running the same algorithm but allowing these changes as well.