Toucan Wireless Split Keyboard with Touchpad
shop.beekeeb.com
shop.beekeeb.com
Do all of the users of these just spend their time in vim? I cannot fathom how they’re used otherwise.
It's got full letters + numbers + what you'd expect in terms of tab/ctrl/shift/meta/etc, 2 thumbs and some 4 extra inner keys for macros or whatever (mirrored on both sides).
It's great. I have a symbol layer so most stuff is on the home row, but I can easily play games without having werido layers or incantations (besides swapping from colemak to qwerty). Having the extra keys means I dont need any combo-layers etc. It's just uh, very practical... You can always just have tighter "everyday" layering if you dont want movement, but without the physical keys you seem to drastically cut out any options.
I never understood going super small unless you are traveling and take it everywhere with your laptop or have super tight desk space. Even then, my enormous huge gigantic 56key split is still only about as big as a 10keyless. I waste more space putting my note pad and food in between the two halves.
It's an comparatively ancient keyboard, 10 years old now probably, and it was my first, so I didn't really know what I wanted re switches and caps. It's so old its all hand soldered, no hot swapping. I do like you, periodically peek around at splits to upgrade but I think I will have to go down the custom PCB route to really get what I want.
At least now most are starting to ditch TRRS interconnect cables for USB-C which never made much sense to me. At the bottom end I could believe, 10 years ago, that maybe the USBC parts were more expensive and the extra $2 wasn't worth it (I dont agree but I follow the reasoning...), but the ZSA Moonlander sells for $360 USD and still uses a TRRS. Imagine melting $180 because you plugged the cables in the wrong order!? At that price it just seems lazy, or cheap, or that you actually don't have the engineering skills to build a product and are just reselling cobbled together opensource designs. (Edit: Their new keyboard the Voyager from a year or two ago also still uses TRRS!) The SOL was pretty ahead of its time for some reason on that front.
Though I think if I make my own I might go with a RJ11 for aesthetics.
I'm not sure you'll find a proper full-sized spilt ortho keyboard - with numpad, arrows, etc - without building it yourself at least.
The column stagger is quite good though, especially to make up for the little finger being shorter.
Fewer buttons is a less obvious improvement, but it does help to reduce hand movement. I’m programming and gaming just fine without F keys or a number row, for example. And there are good commercial designs that have such keys, like the Glove 80.
I do spend lots of time in Emacs, but also use it for plenty of gaming. Just remap in-game to ESDF and only use the left hand. (Or set up layers, but I'm generally too lazy for that).
I think the thumb clusters are great, but may not be to your taste. I'm very happy with it, but have used various iterations of kinesis keyboards for a long time now.
- Wireless
- Integrated pointing device
- Aligned 1u thumb keys
- E-ink screen
- Aluminium plate
- Below $200
I'm interested for sure. Thanks for sharing.
I'm not sure I see the e-ink screen as useful, but that touchpad caught my eye. What do people use that screen for?
Yes, it is for the enthusiast mechanical keyboard community. Everybody has their own preferences for switches and keycaps and there are hundreds of varieties of both.
Probably has to do with a decade of hobbyist keyboard culture centered around separate small-batch group buys where specialized switches, keycaps, and boards and maybe even stabilizers.
(Previously, the keyboard, durability, and repairability were also ThinkPad selling points for enthusiasts.)
The durability is mediocre, and repairability is only better than an iPhone.
Will try this out, if its still possible to buy
I would definitely prefer their trackpoint module be "flipped upside down" so the nub was on top, directly next to the H key, so I could move "just the index finger", and not my palm, but it's really not a big deal now that I'm used to it.
They seem to get this feedback a lot, b/c they have an FAQ entry about (nub location), which asserts the current thumb location is due to space/engineering constraints. But, dunno, I kinda wonder if that was for the smaller UHK60? B/c just looking at my UHK80, it really seems like the nub could be by the H if they wanted it to. :-)
So not "perfect perfect" but still really amazing imo, and so glad I switched over -- I'm like 10 years late to split keyboards, custom layers for movement / programming binds, everything the cool kids have been doing forever, but I couldn't give up a trackpoint. But here we are, finally! :-)
(Also fwiw I held off on the UHK80 for about a year b/c they were having firmware issues on initial release, repeated/missed keys, that sort of thing, but its been rock solid for me; literally zero issues.)
TEX had a whole line https://tex.com.tw/products/shura
The classic Happy Hackers Keyboard has one. https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb-studio/product
And Lenovo itself offers several usb keyboards with TrackPoint https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F3U4TQS
Also available with up to two trackballs or touchpads.
And <$200 for this combination of features is shocking. I'd have probably been a instant buy if I was in the market for a minimal split.
EDIT ADDED: I'm guessing maybe there is a control that causes other symbols to become visible on the keycaps, replacing the default A-Z symbols, and they never show those alternate symbols in the photos because we're supposed to know it does that.
It’s programmable so you can change what key interactions cause a certain output.
If you don't already know how this kind of keyboard works, we don't care about you and won't bother explaining it to you because you're obviously not worth selling to if you don't already know how a programmable 42 key keyboard works.
You have to pick keycaps, and switches, and maybe buy extra keycaps for some reason. We're not going to tell you why extra keycaps are important or useful, but you should probably buy them anyway for some reason.
I'm pretty sure they would have sold me at least one keyboard, maybe several, if they'd bothered to put even 5 minutes thought into non-keyboard-hipster customers, but I'm clearly not cool enough with my multiple kinesis keyboards, chording keyboards, and mechanical keyboards.
I'm not a keyboard hipster, I'm just a guy who had RSI and doesn't want it again. People like me do actually buy keyboards.
If you have a university nearby, call them and see if they have an accessibility lab, or a service for disabled students. These places usually have all the decent ones, and they will usually let you come in and try them.
failing that, maybe try an ErgoDox EZ or Glove80?
They have tons of Youtube videos answering basically every question one could have, and the keyboard is substantially larger with more keys which means less wizardry getting used to these kinds of keyboards. Example: which keyboard to buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8FeBPREzZA
I might end up buying smaller keyboards in the future if I lean more into the whole "modifier keys to do crazy stuff", but for now I'm extremely satisfied with the no-bullshit comfortable solution that the Defy offers me, and I do not care one bit about not using this or that custom firmware. It just works and works well.
Keyboards like the one in OP are definitely not for people who dont know much about split kbs, or who don't know what ortholinear and columnar and home row modifiers and QMK and ZMK mean.
If Dygma seems too corporate, too expensive, or too locked down of a firmware for you, the Glove80 and the Moonlander would probably be the best picks/search terms.
I've been using programmable columnar split keyboards with modifier keys for decades, and chording keyboards before that. None of those things are at all new, nor are they particularly difficult. What seems to have been added in recent years is this weird keyboard-hipster-macho mentality that seems to have overtaken the community.
If it takes more than a PhD (which I have) and decades of experience with programmable remapable keyboards (which I also have) to use your keyboard, you're doing it wrong. If, as a professional software product engineer (which realistically most users of this type of keyboard probably are) you can't see that, you're probably way too far down a weird keyboard-hipster well and would probably do well to pull out and spend some time refreshing yourself with a reminder of how empowering good UX actually is. Bad software UX isn't actually "power user" stuff, and pretending bad software UX is an actually good thing is simply denial of how bad one's software UX apparently is.
It seems highly ironic that a community focused on keyboard productivity would fall into this particular hipster macho mindset, but for whatever reason it seems to have taken hold like wildfire. More power to you all, I guess. Definitely keep up the polite and welcoming aspects of the community, and perhaps one day some branch of the community will wake up to the fact that keyboards are a UX affordance, that the keyboard community is deeply passionate about their user experience, and that a good software UX actually matters and would in fact be a good thing and not a bad thing.
It’s more that it doesn’t matter after you set it up. I have a relatively normal keyboard except with more shift-like keys.
I considered other keyboards and essentially preferred having a UI that makes sense, a keyboard that does more than I need, and a ton of helpful videos that explain things in clear terms.
While I don't have a PhD like you do, I value the attitude as much as you do. So I'm hoping my original message didn't come across as putting you down somehow.
Or maybe "you must be at least this far down the rabbit hole".
If you're a total keyboard nerd then you will have formed Opinions on which switches you like based on the sound they make and the feeling when you hit them. Follow a keyboard nerd community like /r/mechanicalkeyboards or /r/keebgirlies and you will see people constantly posting videos of them typing on their new keyboards to show off its "creamy thock" sound. There's like a few dozen different switches out there and some keyboard nerd shops will sell you a little block of a bunch of different switches with keys on them solely for you to poke them a lot and decide what you like. Or you could just take the default option.
If you're a total keyboard nerd then you'll have a copy of the QMK source set up so you can make edits and shoot it to your keyboard with one keypress. Or an even more esoteric open-source keyboard firmware package because you have Opinions about that too.
Picking keycaps is easy: what color do you want them to be? Do you want a few extra keycaps in a contrasting color to mark the home row, WASD, various shift keys? Keys with astrological symbols, abstract designs, or cartoon characters instead of letters? If you're a total keyboard nerd you are probably fine with keycaps with no letters on them because you have a complex setup with a lot of layers. Maybe you want to go even deeper down the rabbit hole and buy a transparent acrylic key with a little sculpture in it. Maybe you care about the shape of the keys, too. There's a bunch of different possible profiles for the tops of keys, because that contributes to the feel too and some people like to have Opinions about this.
It's a really deep rabbit hole!
Here's one typical qwerty-ish layout for 42 keys: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...
And for something more weird but still fully featured, Miryoku is a fairly common micro-keyboard layout, https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku .
Why? Well, I really admire Jonas Heitala's documentation of his journey to find a layout that fit his aesthetic: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2023/11/02/i_designed_my_ow... . My layout isn't as extreme, it's still qwerty-ish, but I've been heavily inspired by his thorough analysis.
Layers sound pretty crazy but if you start slow and adapt towards them, they're just amazingly useful.
Putting all your modifier keys on the homerow is probably the most immediately understandable use of layers: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods
These let you type every character/key combo without awkward pinky stretches.
A somewhat bespoke layer usecase that I find valuable as a programmer is holding "S" on my left hand sets characters hjkl; to the open-surround characters like ({[<
Furthermore, you're looking at a shop... why would a shop listing hold your hand about the topic the product you're looking at is in?
It is a nice looking keyboard but do people find value in such minimal layouts?
If it was available earlier (and a bit cheaper) I'd have almost certainly bought the 360 and I'd probably be happier with it - I think I need a bit more width and a bit more tenting... but the Advantage2 + the Corne has completely convinced me that curved bowls are massively better than flat and I have almost no interest in spending time on flat unless strictly necessary. Ortho and stagger when split are rather clearly the correct choice, but flat just feels wrong and uncomfortable in a way that the Advantage2 never did (though it absolutely felt weird for a while when learning it).
having gotten over the learning curve, i definitely prefer it over conventional keyboards, but would i recommend it to 99.9% of people? no. people who use these kinds of keyboards have either 1. extremely niche problems, or 2. find intrinsic value in novelty, aesthetics, or diy/experimentation
If you're also a productivity nerd who likes keyboard shortcuts and whatnot, these types of keyboards give you (perhaps counterintuitively) a lot more freedom to experiment.
What level of n-key roll over does it support. Ie. can I steno on this keyboard?
TLDR; these small split keyboards are so expensive. $190-500 range. Weird.