6 ms·

Sounds very interesting. I have looked through premium and "custom" keyboards market recently and found out their customness mostly is about look&feel, key plac

Sounds very interesting. I have looked through premium and "custom" keyboards market recently and found out their customness mostly is about look&feel, key placement and omitting "unnecessary" keys while I want a positively custom set of keys: as many keys as possible - full keypad, multimedia keys separate from f1-12 keys, Windows context menu key, also programmable macro keys if possible, no spatial "optimizations" (when manufacturers try to fit all the keys into as little area as possible) etc. I concluded I will probably have to really build my own. My ideal keyboard would even have a ThinkPad-style trackpoint so I could operate the mouse pointer comfortably without removing my hands from the home row :-)

rgoulter 3y ago
> omitting "unnecessary" keys .... without removing my hands from the home row The "keep hands on home row" is the motivation behind omitting the "unnecessary" keys, at least for the keyboards which use a small spacebar and give the thumbs more keys to use. With those small 36-key keyboards, your hands pretty much have nowhere to go except to remain on home row. > as many keys as possible I once saw someone made a keyboard with 450 keys. https://relivesight.com/projects/433/ https://relivesight.com/projects/433/
- Mizoguchi 3y ago
  These small keyboards are usually ortholinear which also helps reducing hand movement. I switched to a OLKB Preonic over a year ago and haven't looked back. After you get used to the smaller factor and non staggered keys format you realize how ridiculously and unnecessarily huge and clunky traditional keyboards are, even laptop keyboards. It's like traveling with a 65 liters bag for years before you learn you can just carry a 40L and travel with less crap and much lighter. It took me a couple of months to come up with the layout that worked for me (and even today I still optimizing it), but once I figured it out the typing experience became just such much better. The QMK configuration tool makes the process of configuring the layout painless and super quick, so you just need the patience to try and iterate.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key. In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After some struggle coming to terms with thumb keys and wells and ortholinerness I switched to it for all tasks except for gaming and my symptoms basically disapeared. About 10 years back I was in a job that was potentially going to cause me to travel a lot, at that point I had already modded my kinesis advange keyboards with custom controllers and wanted to try and build something that travelled better, was smaller, while still not fucking up my wrists. I built a lot of keyboards trying to shrink my luggage. I went ortho and built a split preonic, uncomfortable, then I went down the road that leads to corne/iris/etc (thumb keys, vertically aligned but not horizontally aligned). More comfortable but the thing i always ran into when removing keys. Overhead, you have to remember what layer and key you put xyz rarely used symbol on (and when you are a software engineer that's a lot of the symbols).. at the end of the road I built a very low profile board based on the dactyl with the same number of keys as the kinesis advantage minus the f-key chicklets. Reducing the number of layers i have to remember to 1 that only contains the grave and the fkeys. Then covid hit and I didn't have to travel anywhere. I take my dactyl when I go see my parents, and unloaded most of my other boards for cheap. (i kept a 65 that I play games with)
    - rgoulter 3y ago
      > less keys = more cognitive overhead. Right. The benefits of reducing hand travel / stretching come at the cost of additional complexity. Not everyone will be comfortable with that complexity. I find the complexity acceptable; and in many ways more coherent than traditional layouts. e.g. I'd keep slash and backslash (/\) adjacent (or otherwise paired); a question mark (?) is frequent enough even in prose; so, pipe (|) remains paired to backslash. -- But, yeah, it can be annoying for keys which are used very infrequently.
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  I don't really care that much about the home row (although it's nice to have something right in it so I mentioned). I care about being able to do everything by pressing less keys. Meanwhile a language I often type in (and I type in quite a number of them regularly) has the digits row remapped for extra letters so I can't enter a digit with a single key press without a keypad (I prefer moving a hand to there over using modifier keys). I also make heavy use of F1-12 keys and I have long thin fingers so I woudn't even mind an additional row of keys. Using the mouse every time I want to adjust the sound volume or do something like this is annoying as well. Needless to say I actively use Home, End, PgUp, PgDn and Insert (many compact keyboards lack some of these). At last but not at least, for sake of the muscle memory, I would prefer all the keys to be located at the same places on all the keyboards rather than moved to whatever a place the vendor has been able to fit them in.
drekipus 3y ago
Really you probably just want a normal keyboard with some good firmware. I started out with a moonlander, which had a lot of keys (36 each hand) but to be honest, I'm trying to minimise as much as possible, and remove keys from it. That way I'm fully constrained to the home row. Also, layers are amazing and sounds like something you might want to look into. Hold 'a' and use hjkl for media keys, etc. It's all very flexible
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  I never knew there are keyboards with configurable firmwares, also never heard about layers. Your comment sounds very helpful, thank you. By the way I already considered buying a Moonlander because of its 2-part design - I have an idea of possibly using a computer while lying on the floor sort of like in the Shavasana posture with my hands by my sides rather than in front of me.
  - digging 3y ago
    > also never heard about layers I was just discussing this yesterday with a friend. It's funny how rare and technical it is to understand layers when everyone uses layers every day - shift + 3 does not render 3, but #. But we don't talk about it that way.
    - drekipus 3y ago
      I really want to reconfigure some "shift" values, like shift + space should give you an underscore.. but I have to use a layer button for that, not the shift key
wakeupcall 3y ago
My impression for the popularity of the 75% form factor is due to laptops and people being accustomed to never have used the "missing" keys in the first place. A tell-tale is that default layout even for thinkpads is to set the Fn row to media keys by default... An increasingly smaller number of people use them, despite being a row of freely remappable keys right _there_. What I've seen happen though is that especially on linux you need two-modifier combos (ctrl-shift/ctrl-alt) to perform what you could have done with a single Fn keystroke. Or burn a few extra keys and increase complexity with layers. I went this route a decade ago, and I'm not a fan personally. Removing the Fn row saves 2cm of vertical space from your desk. I see it as completely pointless, even if you never use the Fn keys. And I don't buy the "reduced finger travel" argument either. Holding the modifiers in weird positions to access an extra layer is usually worse than a more spacious keyboard where your hands can be kept further apart and require less chording. But yeah... I commented on another thread on keyboards, and the current keyboard craze is mostly about customization and looks, and very little about the actual typing experience IMHO (there are exceptions of course..).
- ako 3y ago
  Problem with the Fn keys is discoverability: i never remember which functionality is available on which key, and you have to remember different mappings for different apps. Actually thought Apple's solution for this, the touchbar, was pretty nice, sad that it failed...
- Given_47 3y ago
  > despite being a row of freely remappable keys right _there_. Lol right. And I add a shift layer to the fn row as well, to add more fn keys. Sadly a lot of apps won’t support fn20+ but u find more utility binding them to hand crafted actions anyway
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I completely agree. I never understood this craze of removing keys. The number pad is another example of this. Typing numbers is massively more comfortable (and quicker too) on the number pad than it is with the row of numbers just below the F-keys. The amount of desk space people save is so negligible, particularly when people who buy these keyboards typically work in “paperless” offices, that I never understood the appeal. I guess it boils down to people wanting their keyboards to look pretty rather than being actually useful.
thejosh 3y ago
Keyboards are getting smaller, but I love full size ones for programming. I ended up getting the keychron v6, it's wired but fine. Their wireless keyboards are apparently a bit buggy, not sure if the new ones still are. QMK is an absolute treasure. You can use your web UI to setup custom keymaps and stuff using the chrome USB feature. But I may have went off the rails, as it's pretty simple to completely customise your keyboard with layers etc if you know a bit of C. Warning; this is a gateway into a land of a obsession. :-)
unnouinceput 3y ago
Same here. All these modern keyboards are missing a lot of what old one had. The most I miss most is the Alt GR one, the bigger ENTER key and I want a lot of space. Call me fat fingers if you want. So I started to actually create my own. And I want it to be programmable. And movable, as in you can move the key around, enlarge or shrink them. And when I say I want them programmable I meant to pull a little gizmo out of it, hook it up to a separate power source and load preset or connect to computer and use an app to make the keys look different. So far my idea is to have each key include a magnet, an ESP32 chip and a small LED screen on top of it. The controller to all those 110+ ESP32 chips will be a RPi CM4 module, which will also be the USB connection for the PC. That's one iteration because this way I can actually have a click-clack mechanical one. The other iteration is to just have a big ass touch screen and the RPI underneath to just play that as an app that simulates the keyboard. Prettier, way more customizable as key positions/size go but no click-clack sound/feeling. I'm $2000 in my research hole for this with nothing to show up for but is fun. Probably next year I'll finish it :)
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  I agree but I don't need the keys look anything. The best thing happened to my keyboard life so far was having to use a keyboard without the letters of a language I used daily drawn on it. I would rather buy "das keyboard" with purely black keys but it doesn't have enough keys for me to invest in. However, I would love to have your software-defined visually configurable keyboard as a second one on my table and every app using it as a sorg of a "toolbar" / command palette. This was what Apple tried sort of (it would have been nice idea if they didn't sacrifice a real keys row for it). To me it sounds like an additional display with touch support can do the job.
  - unnouinceput 3y ago
    The LED display on top of the key, driven by the ESP32 beneath, will allow you to have anything as the letter there, including Arabic, Japanese or just emoji keyboard layout.
- jan_Sate 3y ago

rgoulter 3y ago

> omitting "unnecessary" keys .... without removing my hands from the home row The "keep hands on home row" is the motivation behind omitting the "unnecessary" keys, at least for the keyboards which use a small spacebar and give the thumbs more keys to use. With those small 36-key keyboards, your hands pretty much have nowhere to go except to remain on home row. > as many keys as possible I once saw someone made a keyboard with 450 keys. https://relivesight.com/projects/433/ https://relivesight.com/projects/433/

Mizoguchi 3y ago
These small keyboards are usually ortholinear which also helps reducing hand movement. I switched to a OLKB Preonic over a year ago and haven't looked back. After you get used to the smaller factor and non staggered keys format you realize how ridiculously and unnecessarily huge and clunky traditional keyboards are, even laptop keyboards. It's like traveling with a 65 liters bag for years before you learn you can just carry a 40L and travel with less crap and much lighter. It took me a couple of months to come up with the layout that worked for me (and even today I still optimizing it), but once I figured it out the typing experience became just such much better. The QMK configuration tool makes the process of configuring the layout painless and super quick, so you just need the patience to try and iterate.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  less keys = more cognitive overhead. Having to remember what layer i put fucking pipe on is not better than just hitting the damn key. In ~2000 I started suffering from tendonitis and my coding job became very painful, I tried kind of the 'easy onramp' ergo options at the time, namely the ms 'natural'. It did not help. Eventually someone pointed me at the kinesis advantage (then essential) and I bought one. After some struggle coming to terms with thumb keys and wells and ortholinerness I switched to it for all tasks except for gaming and my symptoms basically disapeared. About 10 years back I was in a job that was potentially going to cause me to travel a lot, at that point I had already modded my kinesis advange keyboards with custom controllers and wanted to try and build something that travelled better, was smaller, while still not fucking up my wrists. I built a lot of keyboards trying to shrink my luggage. I went ortho and built a split preonic, uncomfortable, then I went down the road that leads to corne/iris/etc (thumb keys, vertically aligned but not horizontally aligned). More comfortable but the thing i always ran into when removing keys. Overhead, you have to remember what layer and key you put xyz rarely used symbol on (and when you are a software engineer that's a lot of the symbols).. at the end of the road I built a very low profile board based on the dactyl with the same number of keys as the kinesis advantage minus the f-key chicklets. Reducing the number of layers i have to remember to 1 that only contains the grave and the fkeys. Then covid hit and I didn't have to travel anywhere. I take my dactyl when I go see my parents, and unloaded most of my other boards for cheap. (i kept a 65 that I play games with)
  - rgoulter 3y ago
    > less keys = more cognitive overhead. Right. The benefits of reducing hand travel / stretching come at the cost of additional complexity. Not everyone will be comfortable with that complexity. I find the complexity acceptable; and in many ways more coherent than traditional layouts. e.g. I'd keep slash and backslash (/\) adjacent (or otherwise paired); a question mark (?) is frequent enough even in prose; so, pipe (|) remains paired to backslash. -- But, yeah, it can be annoying for keys which are used very infrequently.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
qwerty456127 3y ago
I don't really care that much about the home row (although it's nice to have something right in it so I mentioned). I care about being able to do everything by pressing less keys. Meanwhile a language I often type in (and I type in quite a number of them regularly) has the digits row remapped for extra letters so I can't enter a digit with a single key press without a keypad (I prefer moving a hand to there over using modifier keys). I also make heavy use of F1-12 keys and I have long thin fingers so I woudn't even mind an additional row of keys. Using the mouse every time I want to adjust the sound volume or do something like this is annoying as well. Needless to say I actively use Home, End, PgUp, PgDn and Insert (many compact keyboards lack some of these). At last but not at least, for sake of the muscle memory, I would prefer all the keys to be located at the same places on all the keyboards rather than moved to whatever a place the vendor has been able to fit them in.

drekipus 3y ago

Really you probably just want a normal keyboard with some good firmware. I started out with a moonlander, which had a lot of keys (36 each hand) but to be honest, I'm trying to minimise as much as possible, and remove keys from it. That way I'm fully constrained to the home row. Also, layers are amazing and sounds like something you might want to look into. Hold 'a' and use hjkl for media keys, etc. It's all very flexible

qwerty456127 3y ago
I never knew there are keyboards with configurable firmwares, also never heard about layers. Your comment sounds very helpful, thank you. By the way I already considered buying a Moonlander because of its 2-part design - I have an idea of possibly using a computer while lying on the floor sort of like in the Shavasana posture with my hands by my sides rather than in front of me.
- digging 3y ago
  > also never heard about layers I was just discussing this yesterday with a friend. It's funny how rare and technical it is to understand layers when everyone uses layers every day - shift + 3 does not render 3, but #. But we don't talk about it that way.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    I really want to reconfigure some "shift" values, like shift + space should give you an underscore.. but I have to use a layer button for that, not the shift key

wakeupcall 3y ago

My impression for the popularity of the 75% form factor is due to laptops and people being accustomed to never have used the "missing" keys in the first place. A tell-tale is that default layout even for thinkpads is to set the Fn row to media keys by default... An increasingly smaller number of people use them, despite being a row of freely remappable keys right _there_. What I've seen happen though is that especially on linux you need two-modifier combos (ctrl-shift/ctrl-alt) to perform what you could have done with a single Fn keystroke. Or burn a few extra keys and increase complexity with layers. I went this route a decade ago, and I'm not a fan personally. Removing the Fn row saves 2cm of vertical space from your desk. I see it as completely pointless, even if you never use the Fn keys. And I don't buy the "reduced finger travel" argument either. Holding the modifiers in weird positions to access an extra layer is usually worse than a more spacious keyboard where your hands can be kept further apart and require less chording. But yeah... I commented on another thread on keyboards, and the current keyboard craze is mostly about customization and looks, and very little about the actual typing experience IMHO (there are exceptions of course..).

ako 3y ago
Problem with the Fn keys is discoverability: i never remember which functionality is available on which key, and you have to remember different mappings for different apps. Actually thought Apple's solution for this, the touchbar, was pretty nice, sad that it failed...
Given_47 3y ago
> despite being a row of freely remappable keys right _there_. Lol right. And I add a shift layer to the fn row as well, to add more fn keys. Sadly a lot of apps won’t support fn20+ but u find more utility binding them to hand crafted actions anyway
hnlmorg 3y ago
I completely agree. I never understood this craze of removing keys. The number pad is another example of this. Typing numbers is massively more comfortable (and quicker too) on the number pad than it is with the row of numbers just below the F-keys. The amount of desk space people save is so negligible, particularly when people who buy these keyboards typically work in “paperless” offices, that I never understood the appeal. I guess it boils down to people wanting their keyboards to look pretty rather than being actually useful.

thejosh 3y ago

Keyboards are getting smaller, but I love full size ones for programming. I ended up getting the keychron v6, it's wired but fine. Their wireless keyboards are apparently a bit buggy, not sure if the new ones still are. QMK is an absolute treasure. You can use your web UI to setup custom keymaps and stuff using the chrome USB feature. But I may have went off the rails, as it's pretty simple to completely customise your keyboard with layers etc if you know a bit of C. Warning; this is a gateway into a land of a obsession. :-)

unnouinceput 3y ago

Same here. All these modern keyboards are missing a lot of what old one had. The most I miss most is the Alt GR one, the bigger ENTER key and I want a lot of space. Call me fat fingers if you want. So I started to actually create my own. And I want it to be programmable. And movable, as in you can move the key around, enlarge or shrink them. And when I say I want them programmable I meant to pull a little gizmo out of it, hook it up to a separate power source and load preset or connect to computer and use an app to make the keys look different. So far my idea is to have each key include a magnet, an ESP32 chip and a small LED screen on top of it. The controller to all those 110+ ESP32 chips will be a RPi CM4 module, which will also be the USB connection for the PC. That's one iteration because this way I can actually have a click-clack mechanical one. The other iteration is to just have a big ass touch screen and the RPI underneath to just play that as an app that simulates the keyboard. Prettier, way more customizable as key positions/size go but no click-clack sound/feeling. I'm $2000 in my research hole for this with nothing to show up for but is fun. Probably next year I'll finish it :)

qwerty456127 3y ago
I agree but I don't need the keys look anything. The best thing happened to my keyboard life so far was having to use a keyboard without the letters of a language I used daily drawn on it. I would rather buy "das keyboard" with purely black keys but it doesn't have enough keys for me to invest in. However, I would love to have your software-defined visually configurable keyboard as a second one on my table and every app using it as a sorg of a "toolbar" / command palette. This was what Apple tried sort of (it would have been nice idea if they didn't sacrifice a real keys row for it). To me it sounds like an additional display with touch support can do the job.
- unnouinceput 3y ago
  The LED display on top of the key, driven by the ESP32 beneath, will allow you to have anything as the letter there, including Arabic, Japanese or just emoji keyboard layout.
jan_Sate 3y ago