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

To me, this is missing an opportunity to be ortholinear - a grid instead of the standard finger straining zigzag pattern. That’s an ergonomic feature you can fit in a low profile keyboard. I think the grid would harmonize quite well with your design aesthetic while adding another feature on top of “pretty and slim”.

I am the sort of person who buys every vaguely ergonomic portable keyboard though, looking for one that has a good balance of portable and ergonomic while still being usable. I’m waiting on the new Kenisis Advantage 360, and I have a Atreus around here in its carrying case. I found the Atreus too tricky to type on :-(.

On other subject, have you thought about a case or cover for the “toss in bag” use case? What about a pointing device like a trackpad area, or touch sensitive keys overall?

My one other critique outside ortholinear is that the large PRODUCT NAME on top of the product is a little much. Maybe tone that down?

I note in the specs you mention kailh red linears, but tactile switches in the blurb up top, will there be a choice between linear and tactile?

I've gone through a few different mechanical keyboards including things from Ramaworks and every time I get fed up with the bulk, the tedium of lubing switches, finding good key caps _with_ the legends I want, and then trying to get things as quiet as possible without super mushy key presses. If this can solve that I will buy one instantly; and I've signed up for the waitlist.

The ZMK firmware allows you to assign or map a wide range of keys and functions to it. The inclusion of an EC11 encoder has become a go-to trend, especially in the keyboard building community, and adopted by the established players. However, it is mostly a bit of novelty and redundant after a while and probably only gets used for the obvious media controls.

>I'll buy a USB touchpad and keep it where it rests on a laptop

You can acquire macropads in a plethora of configurations, from a single key to matrix of keys, only limited by the choice of MCU. All built using either traditional [key]switches and/or mix of encoders. The popular firmwares (QMK, KMK or ZMK) allow you to map the afore-mentioned, so you can choose to enter long IP addresses, purpose it for macros e.g Illustrator, Premiere, Blender, Ableton, Autodesk, Eagle etc., or just use it for regular cut-n-paste type jobs via the use of layers.