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

electronicmaterialsoffice.com

351–360 of 688 posts

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

#351

Love the design in general, nice and understated. I'm not sold on the typograhy for the numbers, it seems a bit overdone. The rotary encoder seems a bit pointless, I wouldn't know what to use it for other then volume perhaps? Could the aluminium base be replaced with more of the recycled plastics? If you are going for sustainable, that seems more sustainable then milling one of the more energy intensive materials we…

Are there any special keyboards, with only rotary encoders, to supplement a regular keyboard? Could be cool to adjust volume, colors, text size, scroll position and whatever is possible.

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

#352

Is it possible to remove the 'rotary encoder'? As someone who often carries his keyboard around in a backpack, I think this part can break very easily.

I hadn't considered that but you raise a good point. I'll look into it.

Maybe consider a different design like this keyboard: https://www.amazon.com/CORSAIR-PLATINUM-Mechanical-Gaming-Ke...

The roller in the top right is mapped by default to the volume which is very convenient.

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

#353
post #34
post #2

Looks really nice BUT: There's a split between what people online post pics of on fancy desktop setups and what people prefer to use as their daily driver. Minimal keyboards are for minimalists, and people who like to show of their setups. Just like desktop vanity posts typically have speakers, yet everyone uses headphones. Anecdotally there was a post recently on some PC subreddit asking what keyboard people preferr…

> Only people who didn't WFH much, or didn't have jobs involving any data entry at all could do without a numpad. I'm (mostly) a software dev for 15+ years and I've never felt the need for a numpad. I'm curious now - have I been really lucky that none of my gigs have ever involved any substantial numerical data entry? Do other devs have to constantly do that so it justifies the larger keyboard (which is off-center an…

I reversed the numeric row of my keyboard layout so that the symbols are typed without the shift key and the numerals use the shift key. With that arrangement, a number pad is important for any meaningful numeric input.

But as a programmer, I can't stress enough how valuable it is to type symbols without constantly reaching for the shift key. "Programmer Dvorak" does this as well, but then you have to learn a new arrangement of symbols and deal with numerals that aren't in numerical order.

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

#357

There's a lot of criticism in the comments here, some of it feels very negative. I can imagine reading it as the OP is quite demoralising. Personally I think what the OP has achieved is very impressive. The design looks beautiful, and there's a very "Apple-esque" feel to the website. I love that sustainability has been made a requirement as part of the design. I think some of the other comments give good feedback abo…

agreed. it looks gorgeous and i’m very tempted by it. i’m not really the target market as i don’t really care about a mechanical keyboard.. but i’m honestly considering it.

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

#358

I love this. A lot of the things people dislike I love. Love the site, love the funky key shape, love the serifs, love the big rotary encoder. Subscribed.

I had the same reaction and am now also subscribed.

- low profile, fantastic

- not full size. Numpads only get in the way!

- mechanical keys

- rotary encoder. Useful for everything! Fl studio, moving pixels in vegas, audio knob etc.

- i don’t mind the font, but perhaps a version without any typography would be nice.

I hope they’ll ship to Norway.

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

#359

I want to hear more about what you expect the rotary encoder to be used for. You clearly put a lot of thought into making it happen, so - why? I feel like there must be some interesting use cases, but I'm drawing a blank.

Switching virtual screens jumps to mind for me.

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

#360
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its designed for apple and not windows. Note the presence of a command key. Apple calls the backspace key a delete key even though its not. (It may do delete as a shift option.)

> Apple calls the backspace key a delete key even though its not Historically the backspace key is literally that, moving the typewriter's carriage back (when the space key moves it forward). On current computers the space key now inserts a "space" character instead of simply moving the cursor a step right. Backspace isn't symmetric to that anymore, as it doesn't even insert a space back but deletes backwards, so it…

I personally loved the old Sun keyboards that backspace and delete right above each other so you could fix the most annoying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcommon terminal problem by just moving a finger instead of screwing around with tty settings.
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