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Keyboards

I have been writing about keyboard here before, but I did miss the opportunity to write about my latest adventure in keyboard space. To recap the previous ones, I started with Planck (40%, 12x4 ortholinear), and then moved over to Gherkin (30%, 10x3 ortholinear). After that Planck felt kind of big so I could not move back. Gherkin has been my daily driver mostly for the last 2-3 years now. I do some mistakes, but all and all it is very comfortable due to not requiring me to move my hands much at all.

In October last year I thought I really had to try a split layout to make sure I was not in a local maximum. I went for a Corne layout which is two mirrored halves, each 3 by 6 keys, plus three additional thumb keys, so a total of 42 keys. I think it still counts as a 30% keyboard though. I could not use my Gherkin layout unmodified of course, but the new Corne layout was heavily inspired by it, only the thumb keys provided some dedicated modifiers and a backspace key (such luxury!).

Initially I thought these additions were great, and it remove some of the "bad chords" I have on the Gherkin, which are easily mistyped. I put the halves quite wide apart, and it felt natural. However, after a while it gave a new kind of strain, so I ended up putting the halves much closes together. The additional keys added to the width and made it more like a Planck and thus a bit less comfortable. Lastly, with both the Planck and the Gherkin I sometime find it nice to put the keyboard in my lap, under the desk almost. This does not work with a split layout since it is hard to get them to stay, one on each thigh.

I have been running the Gherkin at the office, where I spend about two days a week, and the Corne at home, where I spend the rest of the work days, plus free-time projects. My findings after this month experiment are that I will want a second Gherkin at home, but I will do some late adjustments to things that are not working that well. So I have now a kit to build another Gherkin waiting for me when I come home from vacations and such.

On another note, my UConsole finally arrived (I ordered it in September last year) in time for vacations and I have been trying it out for learning OCaml. I am also writing this post on it (but with an external keyboard I found at my parents house, where I am now). The keyboard, which was the part I was most worried about, is fine for some light programming and typing, but for writing this it would have been a workout for the thumbs. But generally, modifiers work well, except Super is missing, but for Raspian defaults that is not a problem. It does the job in vim at least. Maybe I should write more about it in a separate post, when the wifi antenna upgrade has arrived and I have it installed.