💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › s › mechanical-keyboards › 1950 captured on 2023-06-16 at 17:09:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Some non-gemini friends insinuated that there would be an overlap between geminauts and mechanical keyboard nerds. Let's test that hypothesis! I (their only data point) have been daily driving my gherkin 30% keyboard for well over a year now (or is it two?) for fun and profit. Before that I had two planck 40%. How small is too small? What are you using? Am I alone here?
Posted in: s/mechanical-keyboards
2023-06-14 · 2 days ago
I'm definitely a card carrying member of the club :) planning on posting in detail on my capsule about it at some point.
I already shared my preferred keyboard layout for the Fingerworks Touchstream:
It's very definitely not a mechanical keyboard--no moving parts--but I kept the same layout with a few tweaks when I moved to a mechanical keyboard later. It's almost a minimal layout, I guess, with all symbols and numbers using chords/layers.
how is it getting used to the key layout like that? been my reason for not getting a smaller keyboard / layout like this. also been toying with the idea of using Dvorak but don't have the time to train myself.
I switched to this layout at the same time as learning Dvorak... it took a while to get used to, I guess a few months, but was definitely worth it. I can still use a normal Qwerty keyboard fine.
2023-06-15 · 2 days ago
@gritty since I only changed the non-letter part and stuck with qwerty it was not that painful for me, it took a couple of weeks to reach a productive state. I guess it helped a bit coming from planck, which was a bigger step for me. The downside with all this is once you realize you can change everything, it is hard to be happy and you're always looking for improvements. I have been toying with the idea of putting some letters on a second layer, giving room for some often used programming keys, like parenthesis. It is a rabbit hole for sure!
@Morgan that is an interesting piece of hardware! I feel I would miss tactility but maybe it is a matter of getting used to. I really like the idea of having the mouse built in.
@johan
The TouchStream is/was great--I wish there was a modern device offering similar capabilities. I finally switched away from the TouchStream because I got tired of maintaining a Windows XP VM in order to configure it.
I'm very happy with my current setup, though. I use a split keyboard with an Apple trackpad between the two halves. It's not quite as convenient for mousing as the TouchStream was, but it's pretty good.
Re: customizing, yes, it definitely takes some time once you start iterating :) my TouchStream layout was version 84, if I remember correctly.
2023-06-15 · 1 day ago
