ErgoMechKeyboards

I wanted to design a funny keyboard with an alternative to TRRS, so I made this floppy disk sized keyboard! (Perfect replica, under 10cm x 10cm)

I made a build guide for it too: https://lexp.lt/posts/floppy_keyboard/

While I'm particularly looking for chords (ex: if jkl; are all keydown at the same time then send the space keypress) I'd be happy to hear about your keymapping approach in general. E.g. how do you organize your layers, have you needed to custom compile anything, mapping choices you regret but are too hard to change now, etc.

I got my first ergomech board recently. I've got the background to flash the board manually and code everything in C. But before I go down that very deep rabbit hole, I wanted to see if what others had done/learned.

Personally I'm not planning to go full asetniop with cords. I think I just want a handful of chords to go along with layers.

This is admittedly a lazy post where I show that I haven't done much research.

Whenever I start searching around online, I find tons of smaller companies selling ergo keyboards or parts for keyboards, but they are always very pricey and don't match the layout I want. I quickly give up since it can take long to search store-by-store online.

The keyboard of my dreams has:

1. All (104) the keys. This means arrow keys and as numpad. I like the layout of my current keyboard (below). I guess this is called a "full keyboard"?
2. Mechanical and with plenty of clackedy clack in the keys.
3. Corded with USB (I still miss PS/2 :))
4. Is curved, similar to this one.
5. Has the "Y" key on the left side of the gap! This is my biggest sticking point. I have realized that I type the "Y" key with my left hand 99% of the time and I don't want to change.
6. I am also willing to investigate split design keyboards if the "Y" is on the left and a numpad can exist separately which I could put to the right of my mouse. But still I'd prefer that to be attached.
7. I don't care about RGB or lights or much else. Take it or leave it.

For reference, this is my current keyboard and I actually quite love it. I just wish it was curved.

After a few years of tinkering and learning I'm finally ready to share the result of my work. Meet Kühlmak. What started out as my attempt to create the perfect keyboard layout morphed into a project to make a flexible and fast analyzer and optimizer. The feature highlights:

• Command line interface
• Information-rich, text-based layout overview and stats
• Support for different types of physical keyboard layouts and fingerings (row-staggered, angle-mod, column-staggered and more)
• Extremely fast analyzer that enables simulated annealing
• Multi-threaded annealing to find many optimized layouts quickly
• Multi-objective fitness function with soft targets for individual objectives
• Multi-objective ranking system to identify the best trade-offs out of many generated layouts
• Metrics that naturally favour finger and/or hand balance for effort, travel and n-grams
• Finger travel distance weighted by speed (inspired by Semimak)
• Comprehensive same-hand bigram, disjointed-bigram and same-hand 3-gram scoring system
• Support for affinity of Space to one thumb or both
• Optional constraints to enable steering certain layout features (e.g. preferred positions of punctuations and shortcuts)

The terminology and metrics are partially inspired by and partially adapted to The Keyboard Layouts Doc (2nd edition). However, I made some deliberate design choices and probably introduced more subtle biases that deviate from some of those definitions. There is lots more information in the README.

At this point I consider it ready enough to finally optimize a layout for my Mantis keyboard and see if it works as well as I hope it will.

Hey,

I'm choosing keys switches.

I have to choose between kailh red or the pro red (for a zsa voyager).

I'm torn because I'm reading online that many find the normal reds too stiff, but I'm worried that the pro red won't allow me to rest on the home row without misfires.

I absolutely do rest my fingers on the home row. Especially when starting typing. I use the concave feel of the caps to confirm I'm in the right place to start.

My research suggests that the mx blacks I use at home are stiffer than the reds (60gf, but much more travel), and the keys on my thinkpad are in theory stiffer too (57gf).

Has anyone here trodden this same path? Any insights?

Hey folks, me again.

Those of you who went from a larger keyboard to a smaller one that required the use of layers: was the transition hard? Could you still type on the old keyboard after?

Context: I was asking the other day about which ortholinear to get for commuting. Although the glove80 is the closest to my current home desktop keyboard, I've ruled it out as I don't think it will fit in my backpack. If it does, it will take up too much space.

So I'm looking at something like the voyager, but with such a small keyboard, there will be a learning curve. I'm used to ortholinear, but I've never used layers. And if I manage to adapt, it'd be nice to still be able to use my desktop keywell keyboard at home.

Thoughts?

I'm posting here because I have nowhere else to post. If you squint, this meets the community rules because my current keyboard is a Piantor/42, and my issue stems from a combination of 40% and QMK behavior. Although, to be honest, this is mostly about QMK, but using Discord is painful, and I'll go there only as a last resort.

For a long while, I used Kanata on my laptop, and desktop an ErgoDox, having replaced kmonad because of one certain feature: tap-hold key sequence behavior. It's best described here, but the tl;dr is that (press lsft) (press a) (release lsft) (release a) where a is a tap-hold key should output "A" and not "a" -- kmonad outputs "a".

A few months ago, when I got my Piantor, I discovered that this sequence outputs no character, and although there's an option that makes it output "a", I can't find a combination that makes it output "A". I'm asking whether, in the bewildering set of QMK variables, is there a way to configure QMK s.t. the sequence (press lsft) (press a) (release lsft) (release a) outputs "A"?

That's the main thrust of my question. As a sort of addendum, I think this behavior is behind another of my QMK irritations: I'm a reasonably fast typer, and often will be typing the next key before I've completely released the previous key. This means I have to set a large-ish time-out before tap-hold engages, which introduces an annoying delay whenever I want to chord a layer and get at, e.g. numbers. I do understand that this is may be an unsolvable issue, that it's just an unavoidable limitation on small keyboards in having so many common keys (numbers, punctuation, and arrows are the worst -- coding, nearly half the text are characters from layers). Either I have a long timeout and and live with an annoying delay when I want to type (many) punctuation characters or numbers; or I have a short timeout and frequently accidentally shifting layers. However, I feel as if this might be mitigated somewhat with the Kanata-style key sequence handling, because even though my Kanata configuration is nearly an exact mirror of my QMK layer configuration, I never have this problem with Kanata.

I suppose I could give up on using QMK for anything except the most fundamental mapping, and use Kanata instead. However, there's an appeal to the portability of having the programming in the keyboard itself; it makes me a little less dependent on the computer to which the keyboard is attached.

Hey,

I'm looking for a portable ortholinear for taking to co-working in my backpack.

For context, I'm a coder. I use neovim all day. At home I use a maltron 3d. It's a fantastic comfortable keyboard (I think kinesis nicked the design?), although it did take getting used to.

It's the only keyboard I've ever been able to touch type on.

So yeah. I'd like to find something similar that is portable. It has to have quiet switches, as it's a shared office. Any suggestions?

So far I've looked at:

• zsa moonlander
• zsa voyager
• moeergo glove 80

Those all look nice, but are too expensive.

How does the ergodox ez hold up these days?

Finished my first build, it turned out prettier than I expected honestly. I got a diodeless kit because I had never soldered anything before, it was quite a fun learning experience. Also my first mechanical keyboard, I'm really enjoying the feel of the keys (Kailh sunset).

I was really worried about adapting to the column-stagger, I've only used the regular row-stagger before, but after one hour of practice I was already typing at about half my normal speed, so I'm pretty happy.

I do feel that I need wrist rests though. not sure how to fix that yet.

I find that having a way to check the battery and connection status is very useful with wireless devices. Traditionally, the way to do this is through the addition of a display. However I always thought displays were a bit overkill for that and once I started using Xiao BLE controllers I noticed that they have an RGB LED built onto the controller itself that can be programmed.

So I wrote a small tool to indicate the battery and BT profile status that uses that LED, and I thought I'd share more broadly in case it is useful to others. It's pretty easy to add to your ZMK build as documented in the README as it is a ZMK module.

While it supports Seeeduino Xiao BLE out of the box, it's also easy to add support for it if you have a custom keyboard that has three dumb LEDs for RGB colors.

I like the glove80, but I don't want my keyboard to have any lights on it, and I want blank keycaps

I feel like I could find it for much cheaper without these things, but I also want it to have that instant actuation/deactuation found in certain gaming keyboards that makes the latency effectively tiny

Is there anything like this on the market? I can't find anything.

Im using my first mechanical keyboard and the experience has been great so far but, it is quite loud, especially at night, which cheap mods i can make to make it quieter while i can do something like changing the switches?

I'm trying to make myself a little Sweep clone with Ergogen. I'm following the amazing flatfootfox guide, but the guide doesn't talk about how to make a board flippable. I also watched the Ban Vallack videos and he kinda mentioned it but it didn't really go in depth. Are there some resources on what to keep in mind when making a board flippable/repositories for flippable footprints?

It's summer and it's hot.

Prime Day wasn't that great.

Things are a little weird.

So, we're having a Basically OK Sale in support of just being basically OK!

Get 15% off any order of $100 or more with checkout code YES-I-AM-BASICALLY-OK. Sale ends at midnight, July 31st.

Our keyboards are a bit more than Basically OK, of course. They're premium builds with gorgeous acrylic-coated resin cases, silky smooth trackballs and hot-swappable switches, with options like full wireless support, cool screens, scroll wheels, and RGB. (Haptic support is coming, too!)

Full Dactyl Manuform Builds (both wired and wireless)

DIY Dactyl Manuform Build Kit

Resin Dactyl Manuform Case Prints

PLA Dactyl Manuform Case Prints

If you'd like to try a Dactyl Manuform case on for size, we sell "sizing prints" of our C stock keyboard cases so you can actually try a case in hand to gauge how it feels.

Sizing Prints

And feel free to reach out if you have questions!

Cheers!

Andy @ Wylderbuilds

I created a short video on how to use the Latin extended/supplement characters (æ,ã,š,ß,ç, etc...) and how to pick other alternatives (sent via Unicode). High res version here: https://youtu.be/3h96KhmJhUs?si=rHAo-_tkZzZIPiie

My first ergo mech keyboard was a ZSA Moonlander which I got a little over a year ago. I love it. However, I am now being asked to come into the office more often and am looking at getting something similar, but more portable.

I was looking at the ZSA Voyager since the split keeb, low profile form factor, and columnar layout seem to check a lot of boxes, but I can't tell if I can go cut out that many keys/rows. Mostly concerned about losing the bottom row where I often hit CTRL, and losing out on the 3 thumbcluster buttons I always use.

Questions I have are:

1. Is it easy to switch from keyboard layouts that have dedicated ctrl keys, vs long pressing?

2. If this is used for an office setup where the keyboard is going to basically be straddling my laptop keyboard, do folks often just dance between the split keyboard to the laptop keyboard for those extra keys or muscle memory chords?

3. Are there low profile split type keyboards I should be considering?

4. If I like U4Ts, what type of switches should I be looking at for low profile tactiles but not too thocky and loud?

I'm looking for "fat"? keycaps similar to what Matias uses for Esc, Ctrl, Option, Cmd and Space keys on their ErgoPro.
What search term should I use to find similar keycaps? I've tried "tall", "fat", "oversized", "big", etc., but I only find extra wide (in the X direction) or extra tall (in the Z direction) rather than in the Y direction.
Any help welcome.