65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.
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 dactyl keyboard family with built in trackballs are way nicer than ones with built in track pads at least from my experience. My personal favorite so far has been a Charybdis from bastardkeyboards. Expensive but I don't need a mouse anymore for being productive.
Hah, 2 minutes before my remark. I feel like if anyone has 2+ ergomech keyboards, they should really try something with a pointing device. It's clear they don't mind having an expensive hobby :D
I've been daily-driving a Planck with a custom layout for years now. I developed my own layout (QWERTY based but with punctuation and function keys on thumb-driven layers) and it took me a few weeks to get speed parity with my old 104 key, which was rough. But now I can't go back to a standard layout, it's just so much less hand movement that it feels so much better to type on. For gaming it's still a tossup, as most games expect you to have all the same keys in the same places. I've experimented with a "gaming" layer, but lacking a 5th row on the Planck still causes issues with some games.
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.
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.
They are nice but please also look into the atreus, it uses a column stagger and has least some angling for your wrists.
It’s both a finished product and also a set of instruction for DIY. Otherwise r/ergoMechKeyboards has a plethora of unibody and split small keyboards
Keyboardio sells both the Preonic and Atreus (https://shop.keyboard.io) fully built with a variety of key switch types.
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.
That's a 10440 lithium ion cell. It's the size of a AAA battery. Probably bigger than the keyboard needs but they are cheap, standardized, and easy to source.
For people who like small keyboards, why do you NOT have an integrated trackball/pointing device? E.g. I love my Charybdis, but I rarely see people advocating for a keyboard with a pointing device. Does a trackball disqualify it as "small"?
I need a trackball in my life. I am a glove80 user and love the keyboard but god damn do I tire of moving to my ball mouse when I need to. All of the pointer/trackball mods for the glove80 are janky at best. Help! I want to be proven wrong.
I personally use a 3x6 Corne for non-gaming tasks. I would recommend it for anyone that uses a keyboard for more than a few hours a day to preemptively reduce the risk of RSI, especially programmers. The small layout and tenting reduce wrist and finger strain significantly, to the point where when I have to use a regular keyboard at work I can quickly notice the pain in my right pinky. If you want something with curved key wells the Dactyl Cygnus is a Corne-like option. I haven’t bothered to try anything smaller since I don’t see the point (for non-steno), as all keys on a 3x6 are within 1u of the home row.
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.
Quiet keyboards are basically a solved problem. Go get something like a Varmilo Minilo75 or a NuPhy with silent switches, if you don’t want to build your own.
I’ve recently built a GeistGeist Totem. 36 keys, splayed, low profile. With silent kalhi switches.
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
Topre keyboards feel nice to type on and are quiet. They're rubber dome but they have the thing most mechanical keyboards have where you don't have to have a key pushed all the way down for it to count as "pressed".
I haven't gotten down to the 40s, but my daily driver is a 62-key Dactyl Manuform Mini. Admittedly, 3 of those keys are sound driven, so I could see getting down to 58 pretty easily, but after that, I'm not sure what I'd ditch.
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.
thanks, me too. the one big disadvantage here, if you have to go into an office, is either having to own multiple or transporting your keyboard back and forth every day.
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.
I did that, but after a few months there was a discernible difference between 2 identical keyboards due to wear (the one at work was being used much more than the home one). This annoyed me to no end and I sold one of them.
Recently bought a Keychron K3 and so far very happy with it. Its price/quality is really good. The main drawback is that it might take a bit to get used to it, especially if you use laptops with different layouts.
For anyone out of the loop: Size/key count is the new(ish?) metric which perhaps most accurately categorizes the keyboard hobby. E.g. if you look at reddit's r/MechanicalKeyboards, they're mostly <80% layout.
The classic full US keyboard with numpad nominally has 101 keys, HHKB style compact boards usually 60 or so. The bare minimum with all numbers and Fn keys may have as little as 40 keys. Hence:
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.
The actual numbers of keys slightly differ from percentage figures(PC full keyboards had expanded beyond 101 keys as well), but this is how mechanical keyboard percentage notation is often used.
Yea, generally you have full size/108 key boards, tenkeyless (no numpad but other layout unchanged), then 75%/65%/60% which all condense the function row and arrow key block to varying degrees. TFA depicted an extremely condensed (and split) keyboard without even a number row. No idea what to call that.
They look fantastic but I am on the opposite end. The kinesys 360 pro I use now made me enjoy keyboards a bit more. I love all the extra buttons and tbh, would like even some more. Feels like a spaceship.
Same, I designed & built my own 108-key keyboard (no numpad, just a shitload of keys) and it's lovely. I'm very slowly binding functions to all the extras. https://jfloren.net/b/2024/10/23/0
If anyone is looking into ergonomic keyboards, look into a layout other than Qwerty as well. I swapped to the Corne and Colemak-DH at the same time a few years ago. The Corne is beautiful, but I would say swapping to Colemak-DH provided much more ergonomic benefit for me.
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.
I tried probably 10 keyboards in a very short period when I had wrist pains. The Glove80 completely solved it for me and I never have pains anymore. I would rank from highest importance to lowest:
- 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.
I'm not a fan of mechanical keyboards so I was going to post a link to my favorite keyboard (Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II) and just found out it's discontinued. I'm so bummed out because it's such a great keyboard and the two I use are getting old.
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.
Oh no! That keyboard was incredible. Very compact, built in TrackPoint (tm) pointing stick, and option to use USB dongle or Bluetooth. It was the perfect KVM / server rack keyboard, and uniquely great as a VR headset keyboard. I remember it was frequently out of stock and would sell out very quickly. Cannot understand why they would discontinue this keyboard.
I switched from a typical keyboard to a 75% Keychron K2 HE (https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k2-he-wireless-ma...) and I like it a lot. I wasn't using the side keys enough for the desk real estate required so this is more efficient. However as a result it's hard to go smaller; I like the function keys!
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.
They use special "upper" and "lower" layer keys to switch between mappings. There's a whole open source ecosystem around a project called QMK firmware, and convergent common keymaps for keyboards that use it.
65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.
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 dactyl keyboard family with built in trackballs are way nicer than ones with built in track pads at least from my experience. My personal favorite so far has been a Charybdis from bastardkeyboards. Expensive but I don't need a mouse anymore for being productive.
Hah, 2 minutes before my remark. I feel like if anyone has 2+ ergomech keyboards, they should really try something with a pointing device. It's clear they don't mind having an expensive hobby :D
That looks really nice! I haven't spent much time with split keyboards, particularly the extreme ergo things like that but I am very tempted!
For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb.
https://olkb.com/
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.
I've been daily-driving a Planck with a custom layout for years now. I developed my own layout (QWERTY based but with punctuation and function keys on thumb-driven layers) and it took me a few weeks to get speed parity with my old 104 key, which was rough. But now I can't go back to a standard layout, it's just so much less hand movement that it feels so much better to type on. For gaming it's still a tossup, as most games expect you to have all the same keys in the same places. I've experimented with a "gaming" layer, but lacking a 5th row on the Planck still causes issues with some games.
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 got a low profile ortho 40% called Technik from Boardsource: https://www.deskhero.ca/products/technik-by-boardsource-xyz
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.
They are nice but please also look into the atreus, it uses a column stagger and has least some angling for your wrists. It’s both a finished product and also a set of instruction for DIY. Otherwise r/ergoMechKeyboards has a plethora of unibody and split small keyboards
Keyboardio sells both the Preonic and Atreus (https://shop.keyboard.io) fully built with a variety of key switch types.
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!
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Gonna shill my project, a 34 key solar powered split keyboard https://github.com/cjshearer/cweep.
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.
What is that battery? It looks like it will last about ten years, wouldn't a solar keyboard need a battery about 1/50th the size?
That's a 10440 lithium ion cell. It's the size of a AAA battery. Probably bigger than the keyboard needs but they are cheap, standardized, and easy to source.
I like to be able to sit down at any computer and keyboard and be fully productive right away.
Exactly, so do away with the zoo of national keyboards, any language should be typable on the standard QWERTY keyboard.
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QWERTY is just one national layout among many. It’s not the “standard” by any meaningful metric. Why not let people use whatever layout they like?
For people who like small keyboards, why do you NOT have an integrated trackball/pointing device? E.g. I love my Charybdis, but I rarely see people advocating for a keyboard with a pointing device. Does a trackball disqualify it as "small"?
I need a trackball in my life. I am a glove80 user and love the keyboard but god damn do I tire of moving to my ball mouse when I need to. All of the pointer/trackball mods for the glove80 are janky at best. Help! I want to be proven wrong.
I personally use a 3x6 Corne for non-gaming tasks. I would recommend it for anyone that uses a keyboard for more than a few hours a day to preemptively reduce the risk of RSI, especially programmers. The small layout and tenting reduce wrist and finger strain significantly, to the point where when I have to use a regular keyboard at work I can quickly notice the pain in my right pinky. If you want something with curved key wells the Dactyl Cygnus is a Corne-like option. I haven’t bothered to try anything smaller since I don’t see the point (for non-steno), as all keys on a 3x6 are within 1u of the home row.
> I Like Small Keyboards
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.
Quiet keyboards are basically a solved problem. Go get something like a Varmilo Minilo75 or a NuPhy with silent switches, if you don’t want to build your own.
I’ve recently built a GeistGeist Totem. 36 keys, splayed, low profile. With silent kalhi switches.
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
Topre keyboards feel nice to type on and are quiet. They're rubber dome but they have the thing most mechanical keyboards have where you don't have to have a key pushed all the way down for it to count as "pressed".
Have you tried making your own? Get a board, some switches, some caps, and a soldering iron. Keyboards are great beginner projects
I haven't gotten down to the 40s, but my daily driver is a 62-key Dactyl Manuform Mini. Admittedly, 3 of those keys are sound driven, so I could see getting down to 58 pretty easily, but after that, I'm not sure what I'd ditch.
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.
thanks, me too. the one big disadvantage here, if you have to go into an office, is either having to own multiple or transporting your keyboard back and forth every day.
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.
> if you have to go into an office, is either having to own multiple or transporting your keyboard back and forth every day
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 did that, but after a few months there was a discernible difference between 2 identical keyboards due to wear (the one at work was being used much more than the home one). This annoyed me to no end and I sold one of them.
Not quite as easy if you have to hot-desk, and don't always get the same desk each time you're in the office :)
Recently bought a Keychron K3 and so far very happy with it. Its price/quality is really good. The main drawback is that it might take a bit to get used to it, especially if you use laptops with different layouts.
For anyone out of the loop: Size/key count is the new(ish?) metric which perhaps most accurately categorizes the keyboard hobby. E.g. if you look at reddit's r/MechanicalKeyboards, they're mostly <80% layout.
The classic full US keyboard with numpad nominally has 101 keys, HHKB style compact boards usually 60 or so. The bare minimum with all numbers and Fn keys may have as little as 40 keys. Hence:
The actual numbers of keys slightly differ from percentage figures(PC full keyboards had expanded beyond 101 keys as well), but this is how mechanical keyboard percentage notation is often used.Yea, generally you have full size/108 key boards, tenkeyless (no numpad but other layout unchanged), then 75%/65%/60% which all condense the function row and arrow key block to varying degrees. TFA depicted an extremely condensed (and split) keyboard without even a number row. No idea what to call that.
Keychron K1 Max is the best tenkeyless ultra-slim keyboard IMO, and just about perfect.
I'd say it's a "small" keyboard in width and in height.
Mechanical, can be fairly quiet (with reds), arrow keys, F keys, home/page keys. Well-built IME.
They look fantastic but I am on the opposite end. The kinesys 360 pro I use now made me enjoy keyboards a bit more. I love all the extra buttons and tbh, would like even some more. Feels like a spaceship.
Same, I designed & built my own 108-key keyboard (no numpad, just a shitload of keys) and it's lovely. I'm very slowly binding functions to all the extras. https://jfloren.net/b/2024/10/23/0
If anyone is looking into ergonomic keyboards, look into a layout other than Qwerty as well. I swapped to the Corne and Colemak-DH at the same time a few years ago. The Corne is beautiful, but I would say swapping to Colemak-DH provided much more ergonomic benefit for me.
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.
I tried probably 10 keyboards in a very short period when I had wrist pains. The Glove80 completely solved it for me and I never have pains anymore. I would rank from highest importance to lowest:
- 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.
Although not very small, HHKB is my workhorse.
I'm not a fan of mechanical keyboards so I was going to post a link to my favorite keyboard (Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II) and just found out it's discontinued. I'm so bummed out because it's such a great keyboard and the two I use are getting old.
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.
Oh no! That keyboard was incredible. Very compact, built in TrackPoint (tm) pointing stick, and option to use USB dongle or Bluetooth. It was the perfect KVM / server rack keyboard, and uniquely great as a VR headset keyboard. I remember it was frequently out of stock and would sell out very quickly. Cannot understand why they would discontinue this keyboard.
I switched from a typical keyboard to a 75% Keychron K2 HE (https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k2-he-wireless-ma...) and I like it a lot. I wasn't using the side keys enough for the desk real estate required so this is more efficient. However as a result it's hard to go smaller; I like the function keys!
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.
so how do you type a number?
They use special "upper" and "lower" layer keys to switch between mappings. There's a whole open source ecosystem around a project called QMK firmware, and convergent common keymaps for keyboards that use it.
1: https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware
mee too
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