Made some design updates based on feedback I received from a couple fellow keyboard designers and I just received the first two prototypes this week. Super happy with how they turned out.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Mechanical Keyboards
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Looks funny and elegant, but typing appears to be a nightmare on this layout.
No numbers, important keys shoved out of reach.... OP expects you to bind OTHER IMPORTANT KEYS LIKE ESC/TAB/SHIFT TO BE BOUND TO Q in order to function.....
Might as well just grab a macropad at this point. You'll almost never use the keys for one thing anyways and you'll be doing Ctrl+/Fn+ combos constantly(except you don't even have those buttons, so what are you making combos out of anyways?).
I wouldn't even use this for an emulator. WASD is completely borked and the buttons you'd bind them to instead would then be lost as well and those need to be rebound too. A controller is more useful than this ever would be.
Does this mean you won’t be joining the GB?
How would you even type a "?" with that keyboard. No, I would not use a keyboard that was missing all numbers, 90% of symbols and threw 3 of the keys haphazardly to the side.
This is a joke at best and mostly just waste. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's junk like this that makes the alternate keyboard community look like a bunch of schizos. "Why would I use something that works when I can remove tons of functionality to be cutesy?".
Hard pass.
Chords and layers, my guy. Much in the same way you type a capital letter with a combination of two keys (shift + letter), people using smaller keyboards do the same thing for any key you deem "missing", just with more keys being pressed. There's even functionality where each key behaves differently depending on whether you tap or hold it.
Technically, you can have only 10 keys (one for each digit on your hands) and still get 2^10 = 1024 unique actions! Forget letters; you can have have whole words encoded in those keys, and voila ~ that's basically stenography!
If you don't like it, that's okay! I'd never be able to use one myself either, but the people who can use it do like it; and besides, it's all good fun to see what people can do with these layouts.
I still wonder how anyone would remember and adjust to all these key combos, since there are no labels for them.
I imagine having to look up each character on a large A2 poster.
The same way creative professionals learn keyboard shortcuts for software like Blender, Photoshop, or Premier: practice.
It seems daunting, but honestly it's not that difficult to adjust to using layers or chords on a smaller keyboard, especially when you can assign all those inputs to any key combo you want.