My new keyboard came last week, a Piantor Pro from Beekeeb, a two-person shop in Hong Kong. Quality work.

But the keys are narrower than my fingers (on average), and the deep pinky stagger – offset of the pinky finger’s column of keys – is hard to get used to, after fifty years of conventional typing. To mitigate the problem I made the outer columns repeat their neighbors. I had planned to avoid using them anyway, as practice for maybe someday moving to a board like Ferris without those columns.

Too often after hitting a key on the upper row, I also hit its neighbor below. So I’m considering replacing the nearly flat keycaps with a more traditional style so that my fingers can more easily find the boundaries between them; and if that doesn’t help, replacing the very light switches with stiffer ones for the lower rows.

Anyway. I’ve been fiddling with different algorithms to find an arrangement of the 30 core keys – letters and selected punctuation – that minimizes a crude measure of inconvenience. ( . . more . . )

In anticipation of my next keyboard, I have been doodling layouts of the non-alpha layers, as one does. Today let’s discuss arrow keys. ( . . more . . )

Typing this in a non-qwerty layout on a new ergonomic keyboard. Learning the alphabet anew is of course a challenge, as is getting to know the keys themselves. My pinkies want to rest on the upper row, and the upper thumb keys are hard to reach; I think both these problems could be lessened if the palm rest were higher on the pinkie side.

When I started shopping for a new keyboard, I found quite a rabbit-hole of enthusiasts. The cool kids use home-built boards of only 34 or 36 keys.