Toward a more useful Thai keyboard layout

All of the Thai keyboard layouts are created in the typewriter era. I wanted to create a new one sometime ago since I moved from Kedmanee (Thai's QWERTY) to Pattachote. The problems of the two layouts is they're not optimized for modern keyboards, and even some of the characters are dead eg. ฃ, ฅ, ฦ, ๏. Moreover, Thai numbers are seldomly used in normal situations, hence forcing users to switch to English layout to type numbers or use the numpad. Lastly, I want the layout I created to be keyboard form factor agnostic. I can use 40% Keyboard with both Kedmanee & Pattachote, but still think that it can be better.

Apparently there is a new layout called IKBAEB which resonates all of the ideas, but I want to use modern Thai corpus as a dataset and then generate the layout somehow. Maybe it will yield the same result, but this way I will have an excuse to learn Rust.

For the name of the layout, I will use my family name for now.

Plans

• Learn minimum Rust to process Thai language corpus.
• Generate n-grams from corpus.
• Create typing effort model from n-grams, similar to Carpalx.
• Discover & measure new layout with lower effort from the model.

(This page is still work in progress)