Keyboard Layouts#

Typogre simulates fat-finger typos by swapping characters with their keyboard neighbors. The quality of those typos depends entirely on having accurate adjacency maps—you can't slip from 'f' to 'g' if the layout doesn't know they're next to each other.

Glitchlings bundles several keyboard layouts for different regions and ergonomic preferences.

Bundled Layouts#

Layout	Region	Notes
`CURATOR_QWERTY`	Project default	Curated QWERTY with numeric neighbors for symbol-heavy typos
`QWERTY`	US English	Standard ANSI layout
`DVORAK`	US English	Vowels on home row, consonants opposite
`COLEMAK`	US English	Ergonomic compromise between QWERTY and Dvorak
`AZERTY`	France / Belgium	ISO layout with `é`, `à`, and other accented characters
`QWERTZ`	Germany / Central Europe	Umlauts (`ä`, `ö`, `ü`) and `ß`
`SPANISH_QWERTY`	Spain	`ñ`, acute accents, and inverted punctuation
`SWEDISH_QWERTY`	Sweden / Nordic	`å`, `ä`, `ö` and the `<` dead-key column

Using Layouts with Typogre#

Pass the layout name to Typogre's keyboard parameter:

from glitchlings import Typogre

# German keyboard layout
typo = Typogre(rate=0.1, keyboard="QWERTZ", seed=42)
typo("Größe und Gemütlichkeit")

# French layout
typo_fr = Typogre(rate=0.1, keyboard="AZERTY", seed=42)
typo_fr("Café résumé")

# Dvorak for ergonomic typo simulation
typo_dv = Typogre(rate=0.1, keyboard="DVORAK", seed=42)
typo_dv("The quick brown fox")

Accessing Layout Data Directly#

For custom glitchlings or analysis, access the adjacency maps directly:

from glitchlings.util import KEYNEIGHBORS

# Get the QWERTZ layout
qwertz = getattr(KEYNEIGHBORS, "QWERTZ")

# What's adjacent to 'z' on a German keyboard?
print(qwertz["z"])  # ['a', 's', 'x'] or similar

# All keys in the layout
print(list(qwertz.keys()))

Lowercase Only

Adjacency maps only contain lowercase keys. Call .lower() on input before lookups.

Shift Slippage#

Typogre's shift_slip_rate parameter simulates holding Shift too long (or releasing it too early), producing bursts like "HEllo" instead of "Hello".

This requires a separate shift map that knows which characters produce which when Shift is held:

from glitchlings import Typogre

# Simulate modifier slippage
typo = Typogre(rate=0.0, shift_slip_rate=0.3, seed=42)
typo("hello world")  # "HELlo world" or similar

All bundled layouts have matching shift maps. If you create a custom layout, provide a shift map too.

Custom Layouts#

To add a custom keyboard layout, create a dict mapping each key to its neighbors:

custom_layout = {
    "a": ["q", "w", "s", "z"],
    "b": ["v", "g", "h", "n"],
    # ... all other keys
}

Then pass it directly or register it in KEYNEIGHBORS for reuse.

Why Layout Matters#

Different keyboards produce different typo patterns:

QWERTY users commonly swap e/r, t/y, u/i (horizontal neighbors)
AZERTY users might hit q when reaching for a (they're swapped)
Dvorak users have vowels clustered, so vowel-vowel swaps are common

Matching your typo simulation to your target population's keyboard makes corruption more realistic.