I Like Small Keyboards
samsm.ch
I Like Small Keyboards
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Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#2mee too
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#3For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb.
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#4For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb. https://olkb.com/ 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.
I got a low profile ortho 40% called Technik from Boardsource: https://www.deskhero.ca/products/technik-by-boardsource-xyz
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#565% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#6thanks, me too. the one big disadvantage here, if you have to go into an office, is either having to own multiple or transporting your keyboard back and forth every day.
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#7For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb. https://olkb.com/ 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.
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Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#8For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb. https://olkb.com/ 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.
I've been daily-driving a Planck with a custom layout for years now. I developed my own layout (QWERTY based but with punctuation and function keys on thumb-driven layers) and it took me a few weeks to get speed parity with my old 104 key, which was rough. But now I can't go back to a standard layout, it's just so much less hand movement that it feels so much better to type on. For gaming it's still a tossup, as most games expect you to have all the same keys in the same places. I've experimented with a "gaming" layer, but lacking a 5th row on the Planck still causes issues with some games.
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#9I haven't gotten down to the 40s, but my daily driver is a 62-key Dactyl Manuform Mini. Admittedly, 3 of those keys are sound driven, so I could see getting down to 58 pretty easily, but after that, I'm not sure what I'd ditch.
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.
Re: I Like Small Keyboards
#10They look fantastic but I am on the opposite end. The kinesys 360 pro I use now made me enjoy keyboards a bit more. I love all the extra buttons and tbh, would like even some more. Feels like a spaceship.