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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

LOVE the industrial design. HATE the font, especially on the number keys. But, great job overall!

I actually like the number font, the presence, but the loss of visibility for the shifted symbols is a huge loss. I know where the numbers are -- I admittedly need more reminding for the symbols as I never explicitly practiced them. The muscle memory for them isn't quite as strong and in low light I need to see them.

> symbols need to be lit

100% this.

One of my absolute favorite keyboard designs: G915 TKL Lightspeed got relegated to the donation pile because the symbols were NOT backlit. Such a dumb design choice to save a few cents IMHO.

The keyboard seems to be missing important symbols, such as - and =, so it's likely not the final design.

Those characters are present. The design of the number row is just so 'out there' that you missed them.

Because it's backlit I'm guessing changing the eclectic number row design isn't an option that can be easily changed (for this version anyway).

The usual way of doing backlight is by having the LED underneath the switch and letting the switch transmit the light upwards. Many switches have special cutout positions for this, so the lighting for all the square keys is identical.

The only issue is that the keycap itself needs to be partially translucent and partially opaque, so rather than laser-etching or printing a legend they need to be "double-shot"[0], which means a two-phase injection molding process. This makes altering of the keycaps quite expensive as you need a new set of molds - which is especially bad if you were using one mold to produce an entire set of keycaps at once.

It's definitely doable to ship it with two different number rows, but it's the kind of thing you really want to know at the very start.

[0]: https://deskthority.net/wiki/Double-shot_moulding

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