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. My most recent algo: start with an arbitrary arrangement and try all swaps of two keys, keep the one that gives the most improvement, and start over; if no improvement is found, try rotations of three, and so on up to six. The best so far:
B L C M J Z U I O F
W R S T K X H E A P
V N G D Q / Y ' , .
This is 33 moves from Canary; three of the moves are rotations of three, one of four, and one of five. Northstar gives the same, except for exchanging the E and A columns. Seven other seeds give very similar results.
(Taking an idea from Engram, this algo assumes that the characters < > are moved to another layer, shift-comma is semicolon and shift-dot is colon, making room for apostrophe/quot as a core key. I implemented this in ZMK on my previous board, but cannot easily do so in the standard version of QMK.)
Meanwhile I’m almost salivating for the Pangaea keyboard, whose pinky columns and thumb arc are adjustable with two or three degrees of freedom. I hope someone will make kits available.
I soon got frustrated with the Piantor because of the difficulty of remembering, in real time, which key activates the digits layer, which key the cursors layer …
I have since found that putting the cursors on chords, rather than on a separate layer, works well for me. This leads me to thinking about how to use only 28 keys: two for each thumb, and three for each other finger. Layer[0] is letters, and the two rarest letters (or perhaps more, if I find that punctuation is more important than J or X) are on Layer[1] with the 21 non-alpha printable keys; Layer[2] and Layer[3] have macros, Fn (which I rarely use), some special characters like £€, sound controls and whatnot. Until I get more adept with layers, they can all be invoked by either thumb.
I’ll sneak up on this ideal by stages. At present I have 64 keys, five of them inactive.