Comment by gcoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcoda | Hacker News Reader

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i have DIY ortholinear keyboard. 1x1 spacebar, and lots of usefull buttons under my thumb, i was thinking about making it low powered portable device which can work as a regular keyboard, onion or raspberry with small powerbank an 7" screen. I really hate modern laptop keyboards, we can make them so much more usefull and convenient, but yet, all fancy new devices come with ancient typewriter layout which was result compromise resulted from engineering and mechanical challenges. We have no mechanical challenges now, but still using misaligned, less usable keyboards, why?

Pure opensource device would be really nice, i am not willing to waste money on MS Surface(it can run linux well, and i can use my keyboard with it) or experiment with low powered cheap raspberry, should be enough for typing notes, communication, and vim, something more powerful with proper keyboard, or just a tablet would be perfect for me

I hate the tiny key travel, flat keycaps, removal of pgup/down/ins/del, and putting the function keys as secondary functions of media keys I never use.

> We have no mechanical challenges now, but still using misaligned, less usable keyboards, why?

Inertia. And I have trouble finding an intuitive reason why an aligned grid would make typing easier; just sounds like something slightly different for my muscle memory to adjust to. I can imagine something like the combination of aligned keys spread into a slight arc shape being nicer, just because of the angles involved.

Grid is a bit more intuitive for me, i am not sure how curves and arcs will do for me, grid is really easy mental map, befor this grid keyboard i was not 10-finger typist, now i am, even on regular keyboards.

Biggest downside of regular keyboard - spacebar lots of useless space, put 5 buttons instead of one, your thumb can push a lot of buttons while other fingers do not leave home row, make 2 of them space, shift, ctrl, backspace buttons under your thumb. This is main reason ErgoDox or Kinesis are good, and regular backspace and return key position sucks, keeping index finger on J while pressing Backspace with pinky is a challenge that moves your palm.

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