GalliumHebrew is an optimized Hebrew keyboard layout generated with oxeylyzer using weights reverse-engineered from Gallium. It shares Gallium's punctuation positions (, ' .) so bilingual typists can switch between English Gallium and Hebrew without losing muscle memory for common punctuation.

Hebrew has two standard keyboard layouts and both are terrible by modern standards.

Kraton / קראטון (SI-1452) dates back to typewriters. It has no dedicated comma key — pressing the physical , key produces ת (Tav). Its same-finger bigram rate is over 14%, nearly 5× worse than optimized English layouts like Gallium.

ARKN / ארקן (SI-1452-2) is a 2018 Israeli standard designed by Dr. Yuval Rabinovich. It moved some final-form letters and aligned punctuation to QWERTY positions, but kept most of the same key placement problems. SFB rate remained above 14%. It was never widely adopted.

GalliumHebrew was generated from scratch using a Hebrew Wikipedia corpus of 10.8 million sentences, with optimization weights tuned to reproduce Gallium's design philosophy: balance rolls and alternation, minimize same-finger bigrams, and keep redirects low.

One of the biggest pain points for bilingual Hebrew/English typists is punctuation inconsistency. The three most common punctuation characters — comma, apostrophe, and period — live in different physical positions between Hebrew and English layouts.

GalliumHebrew solves this by pinning , ' . to the same physical positions as Gallium. Switching between English (Gallium) and Hebrew (GalliumHebrew) requires zero adjustment for punctuation — your fingers already know where , ' . are.

Note: Because punctuation is pinned to Gallium's positions, GalliumHebrew is best paired with Gallium or a Gallium variant on the English side. If you use a different English layout, the punctuation positions won't align — and you may be better served by generating a Hebrew layout with pins matching your English layout of choice.

Analyzed with oxeylyzer against a Hebrew Wikipedia corpus:

Key improvements over both standards:

• SFB reduced by ~79% — from 14%+ down to 3%, eliminating the most common source of typing discomfort
• Rolls increased by 37% — more comfortable flowing motions between keys
• Alternation increased by 22% — better rhythm, less hand fatigue

The slightly higher redirect rate (8.2% vs 7.3%) and pinky-ring usage (1.9% vs 0.8%) are acceptable tradeoffs — Gallium itself has 1.59% pinky-ring on English, so this is in the same range.

Kanata is a cross-platform keyboard remapper that works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

1. Install Kanata
2. Copy Kanata/GalliumHebrew.cfg to your Kanata config directory
3. Set your OS input method to Hebrew (SI-1452) (the classic standard)
4. Run: kanata -c path/to/GalliumHebrew.cfg
5. Toggle between English QWERTY and GalliumHebrew with: hold ` (grave/tilde) then press 1 for QWERTY or 2 for GalliumHebrew

The config remaps physical key positions to the SI-1452 key that produces the desired Hebrew character. For example, to get ף (Pe Sofit) at the Q position, it sends ; because pressing ; in SI-1452 produces ף.

Known limitation — Comma: In SI-1452 Hebrew mode, the physical , key produces ת (Tav), not a comma. Since GalliumHebrew maps ת to position F, the comma at position P works by sending the physical , key — which will produce ת in Hebrew mode. Workarounds:

1. Use ARKN (SI-1452-2) input method where , is properly mapped
2. Toggle to the QWERTY layer (hold ` → 1) for punctuation-heavy input
3. Add a dedicated comma key to your Kanata config via a tap-hold or combo

GalliumHebrew was generated with oxeylyzer using:

• Corpus: Hebrew Wikipedia sentences (10.8M sentences, ~450M characters)
• Pinned keys: , ' . at Gallium-matching positions
• Weights: Tuned to reflect Gallium's design philosophy — balancing rolls and alternation, minimizing same-finger bigrams, and penalizing redirects

• Gallium by GalileoBlues — the English layout whose design philosophy inspired this
• oxeylyzer by O-X-E-Y — the keyboard layout analyzer and generator used to create GalliumHebrew
• Hebrew Wikipedia Sentences Corpus by tomron87
• Hebrew standard layouts: SI-1452 (classic) and SI-1452-2 (ARKN) by the Standards Institution of Israel

MIT