Yeah, I’ve been sketching the idea—if you strip the keys down to the core chords and arrange them in a spiral pattern you can keep every command you need, just in a more symmetrical layout. But the trick is mapping the most frequent shortcuts to the most accessible positions; otherwise, you’ll waste more time hunting for keys than you saved. Do you have a log of the commands you run most often? That would help me cut the clutter down to nothing that isn’t strictly necessary.

Okay, that’s a solid core. I’d group them by function so the keys feel intuitive. First cluster for networking: ssh, netstat, ss, ss -tulnp, nmap, ping, ping6, traceroute. Next, file operations: tar, gzip, gunzip, rsync, cp, mv, rm, mv, chmod, chown. Then system control: systemctl, journalctl, apt, yum, dnf, pacman, sudo, ufw, nft, iptables. Next, monitoring: top, htop, df, du, tail, head, cat, less. Finally, utilities: grep, find, locate, curl, wget. I’d put the most used commands—ssh, rsync, sudo, apt—on the middle row, easy to reach, then stack the less frequent ones around. And remember to map shortcuts like Ctrl+S to systemctl, Ctrl+P to ping, etc., so you don’t waste time scrolling. That keeps everything symmetrical but functional.

I’ll set up a small test harness to fire each command through the new mapping and record latency. It’ll run under load so I catch any latency spikes. I’ll ping the results back in a table—keystroke count, hit rate, command output time. Once that’s done I’ll spot any collisions with vim chords and re‑order if a combo is too close to your normal usage. We’ll tweak until the spiral feels as fast as the old QWERTY but cleaner in my mind. Stay tuned.