- similar to using a phone keyboard, everything goes in layers – once you get into the 30% or “small” range, more effort is put into “optimizing” your layout than even into designing the ideal physical layout – you have Ben Vallack doing production work on an 18-key split and people coding on steno keyboards
- 34 keys is all you need
- Designing a Symbol Layer
- but since everything is on layers, you can dedicate an additional layer to something like just Blender shortcuts (and one to just Photoshop shortcuts and one to just Python coding and so on)
- this is not a fast journey and I would not recommend jumping into the deep immediately with a Hummingbird – start with something like a Moonlander and slowly acclimate yourself to removing keys and offloading things onto layers, customizing those layers to your needs
- as an aside, a lot of people who go down the rabbit hole also use the chance to move away from QWERTY as well, with Colemak-DH being a popular alternative – the context switching between learning Colemak on columnar and keeping QWERTY on row-stagger often is enough to not mess up muscle memory
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ErgoMechKeyboards
Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards
Rules
Keep it ergo
Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)
i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²
¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid
No Spam
No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.
No Buy/Sell/Trade
This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.
Some useful links
- EMK wiki
- Split keyboard compare tool
- Compare keycap profiles Looking for another set of keycaps - check this site to compare the different keycap profiles https://www.keycaps.info/
- Keymap database A database with all kinds of keymap layouts - some of them fits ergo keyboards - get inspired https://keymapdb.com/