GECKO finds optimal keyboard layouts and board shapes using a suite of data analysis systems. It has an extremely customizable system for design preferences and world class research tools for analyzing layout quality.

promo.mp4

• Score any layout on any board on over 50 metrics
• Optimize with several algorithms (simulated annealing, tabu, memetic, MAP-Elites, NSGA-II, ...)
• Every run is reproducible.
• Explore the whole landscape of good layouts, not just one optimum.
• Works with boards from TOML, keyboard-layout-editor.com, or parameters (stagger, splay, split, 3D keywells).
• Web UI with a 3D viewer; the browser scores with the same Rust code using WASM.

Quick start

Needs Rust (stable), and for the web UI Node and wasm-pack.

cargo build --release
./target/release/gecko compare                 # rank the reference layouts
./target/release/gecko judge --community        # typing time, comfort, percentiles among community layouts
./target/release/gecko compare --robust        # how sure each rank is under weight noise
./target/release/gecko optimize --time 30s     # writes runs/<id>/
make && ./target/release/gecko serve           # web UI at http://127.0.0.1:7777
make test                                      # everything CI runs

Every command takes --json. See context/cli.md.

Layout

Path
crates/gecko-core	Library: geometry, corpora, metrics, scorer, optimizers, hand model
crates/gecko-cli	The gecko binary and gecko serve
crates/gecko-wasm	The scorer for the browser
web/	TypeScript / React / Three.js UI
data/	Boards, corpora, profiles, reference layouts
context/	Design docs: start at context/README.md
research/	Evidence behind the metrics and parameters

Human contributors: see CONTRIBUTING.md. AI agents: follow AGENTS.md.

Papers

Experiment reports (PDF), each with its data in bench/. Index and drafts: docs/papers/.

Paper	PDF
Is the cost function right?	cost-validity
Optimizing the cost function	cost-optimization
Ranking the modern layouts	layout-ranking
The best English layout	english-layout
The best programming layout with a symbol layer	programming-layout
The best layout for a Vim programmer	vim-layout
What layout designers value: inverse optimization	inverse-fit
Symbol layers for programming and Vim	symbol-layer
Software paper: how GECKO works	software

License

Code: MIT. Some bundled data (the cmini-derived corpora and layout list) is GPL-3.0; see NOTICE.md.