I built my first planck by soldering each keyswitch. That's no longer required. My latest preonic I bought fully-assembled and it works great.
Unfortunately seems to have entirely disappeared from their website despite being a really lovely product that I've daily driven for years. If anyone finds a replacement I could recommend to friends I'd love to know about it.
It still baffles me that the standard layout isn't ortholinear after all these years. There's no reason for staggered rows other than path dependence. But when you have billions of people relying on years of muscle memory on the same layout, it's just not a tradeoff most people are willing to make.
Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.
there was a period where i was doing standard + ortho Plank + an ErgoDox-like on three different machines and it's a bit of a mindfuck context switching between them. extremely inefficient.
The one thing that never really worked in my brain was having multiple layers and a dedicated layer up/down key. I tend to store keys on things where I'd normally hold instead. For instance, my shift keys also hold ( and ) when I tap instead of hold. Same with control and alt. The only layer that I really use would be similar to that raise key, to turn my top row into F keys.
I really wish there was a somewhat affordable way to get good legends on keys that represent this information. I still have to take a beat to remember what | is on my keyboard every time I need it.
I'd highly recommend at least giving a smaller keyboard a go though. The kits that I've seen are fantastic if you want some hands-on tinkering, but also the prebuilt stuff is slick too. I had zero soldering experience going into it, and now it's turned into not just learning about how to use a soldering iron, but also 3D printing, as I wanted to test out a bunch of different keyboard shapes and that was a low-cost way of experimenting.
I love my Corne but I never use it any more because I have to switch to my laptop keyboard too often. I am still able to use an ergo keyboard layout on both, so even when I can't use an ergo keyboard, it is still very comfortable to type.
- Regularly exercise, including proper exercise for your hands/arms.
- Height-adjustable desk + good chair, so that you can micro-tune the height to have straight wrists, etc. It should probably be electrically adjustable, my experience is that most people do not properly set the height if it's more effort to change height.
- An ergonomic keyboard. For me, it has to be column-staggered, split, with thumb keys and a key well. I have reviewed some flat keyboards after switching to key well boards, but discomfort comes back after a few days to weeks.
- A keyboard layout. So, this is the part where I disagree with you. Switching to non-QWERTY is maybe the last 5% of optimization. There is one catch though: an alt layout becomes more important when switching to split column stagger, since you cannot alt-finger as easily and the very frequent letters T/N are in a bad position on columnar boards.
It's hard to believe it wasn't a good seller for them because it was frequently out of stock and when it came back in stock you had to be quick to get one.
There's also a few notes on how reducing the actuation distance using the magnetic switches is a decent productitiy/RSI-reducer but that's a subject for another thread.
I like quiet keyboards but finding non-laptop / non-membrane keyboards that do strip the leather from your wallet, is a almost impossible task. Let alone one that does not grow in noise level over time!
There is way too much focus on a entire enthusiastic click click keyboards, but everything that i keep finding, sounds like absolute horrible loud, in a quiet room, where your partner is sleeping in.
And when you find something, its often a import, not in stock, and you get presented with like a $300 bill and no guarantee about quietness after a long time using. Or worse, they changed the keys in between production runs, and its now more louder.
Why am i writing this? Don't know, maybe tired of often wasting hours seeing youtube videos and reviews, and posts about keyboards to just feeling burned out.
calimoro78•1h ago