this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
66 points (97.1% liked)

ErgoMechKeyboards

5855 readers
17 users here now

Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards

Rules

Keep it ergo

Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)

i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²

¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid

No Spam

No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.

No Buy/Sell/Trade

This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.

Some useful links

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

And then I moved colon and semicolon to layers and re-assigned that outer pinky key to my rarely used AltGr key.

top 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Found the Python developer. Hehe. Thanks for the reminder that we can do this stuff: all the common layouts are just suggestions, we can’t make our lives easier by recognizing that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Coleman-DH: just take the plunge

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I've been interested in this, but for work I have to use keyboards connected to random computers all the time (and bringing my own keyboard isn't an option either). I suppose I'm stuck with QWERTY. I just can't imagine keeping two keyboard layouts in my muscle memory.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

One of us One of us…

[–] 404 2 points 8 months ago

YES.

New title: "I use common letters more than uncommon letters, so I swapped the keys"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious what you think about that little joystick; do you find yourself using it much?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Not yet. When I set it up, I moved the master side to be the right… which caused the axis on the joysticks to rotate 90 degrees. Ha.

I learned how to fix that but haven’t yet. I think I will try to use one side as a scroll wheel. Not sure about the other.

Maybe arrow keys.

In my initial test, they would make a poor primary pointing device.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Now you will never be able to quit vim!

I do use AltGr a load for composing non-ASCII characters. It's currently my inner key where the joystick is. A bit of a stretch but writing C++ in vim pretty much requires the colon/semicolon key on the home row.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Isn't that "convenient" for you. 😜

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Kind of related, but SwiftKey used to have exclamation mark next to the spacebar, so you could quickly enter it. Then they switched it to period. It's annoying as hell because typing on phone I'm much more frequently using! Or? But almost never.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Especially when double space makes a period!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Similar. It was throwing me off while programming though (especially with vim key bindings), so I’m currently trying quotes in the same position but under a different layer on my Moonlander. Most likely going to switch back to quotes to default layer, colon as secondary, and keep backtick in the third layer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

34 keys Colemak forces me to only keep 1 of those keys on default layer.

I currently have colon as unmodded tap, semicolon as shift tap (outer left thumb hold), double quotes as alt tap (outer right thumb hold), and single quotes as momentary layer tap, all on the same key. Makes using Vim very nice, but I'm still undecided on single quotes or colon as unmodded tap. Semicolon is the least used for me.

If I change back to single quotes, I might try tap dance + repeat key instead of using mods, but I'm still trying out colon as unmodded tap for now.