- Impossible to design and fabricate a custom for a reasonable price in time and money
- Use a XKE-128 instead
- Rubber dome switches and caps
- Disassembled a Dell keyboard
- Found it had rubber dome switches (obviously, spongy)
- Good to see and know
- Been using them for years, and they were fine
- Mechanical switch probably isn’t required by me
- N-Key rollover
- You could quickly hit
- Control, Meta, Super, Hyper, Shift, j
- If you designed the keyboard out to make it easy
- 6 NKRO is probably fine
- You could quickly hit
- You must choose a keycap style
- DSA makes it easy to try different layouts so use that
- Cost is a big topic
- Maybe a grab bag is a good option?
- If you want a lot of rows and columns then you need a microcontroller with a lot of connections like the Teensy++
- You must choose available key sizes
- The design tools let you make a keycap any size which helps exploration
- At build time you needs fabricated keycaps in that size
- Easier to use pre-made caps
- 3d printing caps is another option, but I don’t want to do that
- Reality is that doing a custom build
- Will require 3x iterations
- Will cost 3x as much
- Reviewed the Ergodox EZ and it’s not for me
- Thoughtful ideas about OS-Hyper key
- Might be best to use the XKE-128 instead
- Zero fabrication costs
- Well-built body
- Rubber-dome is OK
- Cherry MX compatible stems
- No way I could built for less
- Hobby-ish
- Converting to XKE-128 follows
- Make power keys 2 wide because they are available from PI or SP
- Left align QAZ
- Make PgUp PgDn 1w
- Moved arrows to bottom right
- Added CapsLock back under right super
- Added Ultra* so had to move PgUp to each side of Enter row by shift
- Added a space down the middle to occupy 8×16
- Decided that it would be nice to have a space and return that went from C to M so expanded that
- Move Alt and Gui up to middle because
- They are important modifiers
- Alt-Tab is always two-handed, that is OK
- Their importance doesn’t overlap with Emacs modifiers so you use them in a cognitively different place
- They are important modifiers
- PgUp PgDn go all the way left
- Didn’t add back ScrollLk and Break, can add later if needed
- Swap Super and Shift
- Muscle memory makes Shift happier as expected location
- Makes super-shift easy negating opportunity for Super*
- Every Emacs modifier with * appended includes shift
- Wherever it isn’t easy to do by hand, and free keys
- Add Hyper* to left of hyper making it one key
- This placement of hyper makes sense if you recall the feel of the layout of a typical laptop keyboard after you made CapsLock super. Using your thumb to go to C, M, super with your pinky, and H with your thumb again are natural
- C-s and M-s are natural
- H-s is even natural and H*-s is doable
- Ultra shift is easy now, so U* can go away
- Added Xtrm key for Emacs
- C-M-s
- Ultra below it
- You an go “all out” with Emacs modifiers if you like
- H* still makes sense
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