I Like Small Keyboards
samsm.ch
samsm.ch
Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.
The main thing is... it's gotta have open-source firmware. After switching to something like QMK, I wouldn't want to go back. I customize stuff too deeply to go back... like 8 to 12 layers and a bunch of completely custom behavior. And for notebooks, remappers like Kanata help immensely.
Ideally it's nice to have a small touchpad under the space bar, like maybe 4 keys wide, retro style, meaning a high-DPI zero-force touchpad. But that's optional. With good firmware, I don't really need a mouse because MouseKeys and Warp do most of what I need.
The world has a lot of problems, but ... at least we've got a wide selection of awesome keyboards these days, to suit nearly every person's style and taste. Typing has never been better.
I built my first planck by soldering each keyswitch. That's no longer required. My latest preonic I bought fully-assembled and it works great.
Unfortunately seems to have entirely disappeared from their website despite being a really lovely product that I've daily driven for years. If anyone finds a replacement I could recommend to friends I'd love to know about it.
It still baffles me that the standard layout isn't ortholinear after all these years. There's no reason for staggered rows other than path dependence. But when you have billions of people relying on years of muscle memory on the same layout, it's just not a tradeoff most people are willing to make.
I use the Preonic as my daily driver and really like it - minimal but not too much so. I tried the Atreus like the idea but it was a touch too minimal for my taste - certain key combinations I used a lot at work were too much of a finger twister!
Each half should end up just a bit wider than a smartphone (114mm x 86mm).
I'm still working on the case generation, which is intended to have a metal backplate for magnetic mounting, but I've gotten distracted developing a generic method to convert kicad geometry primitives to cadquery, so others can benefit from this workflow that uses the PCB geometry as the source of truth for generating an enclosure.
I acknowledge that that really isn't much of an improvement, so at this point the solar charger mostly exists "because it's cool".
EDIT: I think you've overestimated active power consumption, I don't know if you'd actively be holding down keys for 2.5 hours per day... Also you estimated using this for 11 hours a day straight, which seems like way too much.
The one thing that never really worked in my brain was having multiple layers and a dedicated layer up/down key. I tend to store keys on things where I'd normally hold instead. For instance, my shift keys also hold ( and ) when I tap instead of hold. Same with control and alt. The only layer that I really use would be similar to that raise key, to turn my top row into F keys.
I really wish there was a somewhat affordable way to get good legends on keys that represent this information. I still have to take a beat to remember what | is on my keyboard every time I need it.
I'd highly recommend at least giving a smaller keyboard a go though. The kits that I've seen are fantastic if you want some hands-on tinkering, but also the prebuilt stuff is slick too. I had zero soldering experience going into it, and now it's turned into not just learning about how to use a soldering iron, but also 3D printing, as I wanted to test out a bunch of different keyboard shapes and that was a low-cost way of experimenting.
I'd say it's a "small keyboard" in width and in height.
Mechanical, can be fairly quiet (with red switches), arrow keys, F keys, home/page keys. Well-built IME. Not exorbitantly priced.
- ElimKeys Elytra https://elimkeys.com/products/elytra, I Finally Found It: The Elytra Wireless Split Keyboard (VIAL, Bluetooth, RMK, travel friendly) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkULzKPmig
- Compose (Estimated delivery Feb 2027) https://read.compose.llc/, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-s...
there was a period where i was doing standard + ortho Plank + an ErgoDox-like on three different machines and it's a bit of a mindfuck context switching between them. extremely inefficient.
That's easy. Own multiple. I have three of the same keyboard: one for the office, one for the home office, and one for the couch.
I like quiet keyboards but finding non-laptop / non-membrane keyboards that do strip the leather from your wallet, is a almost impossible task. Let alone one that does not grow in noise level over time!
There is way too much focus on a entire enthusiastic click click keyboards, but everything that i keep finding, sounds like absolute horrible loud, in a quiet room, where your partner is sleeping in.
And when you find something, its often a import, not in stock, and you get presented with like a $300 bill and no guarantee about quietness after a long time using. Or worse, they changed the keys in between production runs, and its now more louder.
Why am i writing this? Don't know, maybe tired of often wasting hours seeing youtube videos and reviews, and posts about keyboards to just feeling burned out.
It’s more silent than membrane keyboards, completely customizable and super lightweight. (Got a carry box that is the size of a small paperback)
You can download all the schematics (also the board) and case files to print them. The assembly requires a bit of soldering. All in all it costed me ~150€ but I printed some extra stuff to try out.
There are also places that sell kits directly so you don’t have to source all bits and pieces yourself
100%: full w/keypad,
80%: the main part plus cursors,
60%: just the main part, with 0-9,
40%: just QWERTY, no numbers at all.
I love my Corne but I never use it any more because I have to switch to my laptop keyboard too often. I am still able to use an ergo keyboard layout on both, so even when I can't use an ergo keyboard, it is still very comfortable to type.
- Regularly exercise, including proper exercise for your hands/arms.
- Height-adjustable desk + good chair, so that you can micro-tune the height to have straight wrists, etc. It should probably be electrically adjustable, my experience is that most people do not properly set the height if it's more effort to change height.
- An ergonomic keyboard. For me, it has to be column-staggered, split, with thumb keys and a key well. I have reviewed some flat keyboards after switching to key well boards, but discomfort comes back after a few days to weeks.
- A keyboard layout. So, this is the part where I disagree with you. Switching to non-QWERTY is maybe the last 5% of optimization. There is one catch though: an alt layout becomes more important when switching to split column stagger, since you cannot alt-finger as easily and the very frequent letters T/N are in a bad position on columnar boards.
It's hard to believe it wasn't a good seller for them because it was frequently out of stock and when it came back in stock you had to be quick to get one.
There's also a few notes on how reducing the actuation distance using the magnetic switches is a decent productitiy/RSI-reducer but that's a subject for another thread.