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Comment by 000ooo000 | Hacker News Reader

Would love to build one one day. I started building a custom KB, but moved house, packed away the 3d printer, etc, and never got back to it. Settled on a Kinesis Freestyle Edge in the meantime and it's.. ok. I'm not in love with it. The config software is ghastly, too. Though it's hard to find split mech KBs that haven't dropped a lot of keys in favour of layers, or haven't moved keys like [] away from their original locations. I would still buy a second though, rather than carting one to and from work. Guy must love that thing.

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> it's hard to find split mech KBs that haven't dropped a lot of keys in favour of layers, or haven't moved keys like [] away from their original locations.

I think once a keyboard design strays from the 'traditional' layout, it becomes harder to justify features like having a big spacebar, having an asymmetric layout, having a row-stagger.

Especially with a focus towards ergonomics, it's nicer to reduce hand movement and hand stretching; and reduce usage of the pinky fingers in favour of allowing the thumb to be used more. -- Albeit, yeah, layers do trade that reduced hand movement for additional complexity.

I see many designs retain the number row. It's very rare to see designs which retain a row stagger, but clearly intend for the thumb to have 2-3 keys within reach.

| Guy must love that thing.

We're approaching "tattoo this on my body" levels of affection for the keeb.

| I started building a custom KB

I hope you pick it back up! I lost interest for a few months in the middle of building the one in the post, and I'm really glad I got back into it.

Take a look at the Keychron Q10. It's a single piece but with split layout.

https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q10-alice-layout-...

It is perfect for me because I wanted a split layout but like you said, needed keys to be in the same place.

The layers do take a bit of time to get used to, but they become transparent, after a while. As for punctuation locations, I've exploited that to my advantage, I have brackets and braces (which I use a lot of, for Clojure) just next to my left ring and middle finger, and parenthesis are also trivially reachable, of course. (all this on a Dactyl Manuform, with 46 keys total)

It's great that layers work fine for you. But they may not work for other person. Other person may not want to invest his time into learning layers. Or he also has to use a normal keyboard with standard shortcuts. Or there may be any other reason.

Market is definitely missing a full split keyboard (87+ keys). I'm also looking for one and I hate using keyboards with reduced number of keys.

This isn't totally up to date, but it might help: https://aposymbiont.github.io/split-keyboards/

(My site.)

Search for "tenkeyless" aka TKL. Plenty of good ones on the market. IKBC historically had good quality.

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