I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard

When someone moves from keyboard to mouse they should be moving from their elbow joint, to protect their wrists. If anything a numpad encourages this as your resting dominant hand position will be left of the numpad (if right handed, for left hand users this won't be true). So you can't bend your wrist to reach your mouse from that position, you have to move your whole arm - which is good.

VDU guidelines in the UK at least don't specify a bad angle for elbows, just wrist bending (up, down, and sideways) because it's not a common scope for elbows to be bending that far for common tasks at a desk. Certainly a full size keyboard and mouse don't push it that far.

So I don't see the ergonomic issue there. I'm sitting at a full size keyboard with my mouse in hand and my posture is just fine. I could even space them out more and be comfortable.

Obviously mileage varies, and subjectively maybe a smaller person might have a smaller desk footprint. I don't want to go as far as to disregard someone else's experience but it really does seem far fetched.

Nothing wrong with liking small keyboards for other reasons though, like vanity, neatness, tidying away easily, portability, not needing a numpad, etc.

In fact we are considering a software toggle (e.g. FN + ESC or maybe more complicated to avoid accidentally toggling it) that has a "Win/Linux" and "macOS" mode, but I didn't get around testing that yet.

I have an OLKB preonic. And I used QMK to significantly modify my layout. I started out with the modified Colemak - but the re-arranged the keys to move keys which require the index finger to move to the side - on the QWERTY that would for example be G and H . I moved B and K forexample where Z and X are on the Qwerty - and moved Z and X to the number row. The numbers itself appear as a layer when i need them.

Peter Norvig has an article called mayzner : https://norvig.com/mayzner.html - i wrote a program to analyse the frequency of bigrams/trigrams, 4-grams and then programmed them as shortcuts to the keys - using the lower / raise

This means i can type conversation as : con ver sa tion - where con is a trigram , ver is a trigram and tion is a 4-gram. s and a need to be typed out.

my needs : 1. MCU should have more ROM for writing the new preonic has 64KB. 2. Columnar layout - Split keyboard would be ideal.

Reasons for more ROM - you can program a lot more common words in it and Columnar layout would be easier on the fingers.

I've checked out a lot of keyboards - The Iris is good - but the ROM is only 32Kb. The Moonlander is too expensive for me - i cant justify the price to myself right now.

I quit like the tight, minimal look. the variation in key heights and the concave number row keys seem like excellent positioning features.

Honestly, I've used so many keyboards in my time that I'd be quite happy to adapt to this layout and give it a go. It would look great along with my minimalist tower.

Questions:

Does it have feet to provide tilt? It was unclear from the website, but as best I could make out it does not, only lays flat on the desk.

Is it backlit? I would assume 'no' since it isn't mentioned, but the picture of the low profile switches made me second guess, and backlit keys are fairly standard these days.

Are the low profile switches pluggable? I haven't checked in detail but I imagine that manufacturer makes something like blue and brown variants of that switch and I like to have different switches in some places, would be nice to swap out without busting out the soldering iron.

Can the bluetooth module be (truly) disabled or deleted? It could be considered a security issue. I would prefer to avoid bluetooth in a desktop setting.

Otherwise, thanks for posting, this looks pretty sweet. I've signed up under the waiting list.