I was very excited when ortholinear keyboards started to catch on, but then something happened and this ultra-minimalist stuff started pouring out with column staggering and now once again long for someone to make a good ortholinear split keyboard with all of the proper buttons it should have for being actually useful for software development or gaming.
Do all of the users of these just spend their time in vim? I cannot fathom how they’re used otherwise.
It's got full letters + numbers + what you'd expect in terms of tab/ctrl/shift/meta/etc, 2 thumbs and some 4 extra inner keys for macros or whatever (mirrored on both sides).
It's great. I have a symbol layer so most stuff is on the home row, but I can easily play games without having werido layers or incantations (besides swapping from colemak to qwerty). Having the extra keys means I dont need any combo-layers etc. It's just uh, very practical... You can always just have tighter "everyday" layering if you dont want movement, but without the physical keys you seem to drastically cut out any options.
I never understood going super small unless you are traveling and take it everywhere with your laptop or have super tight desk space. Even then, my enormous huge gigantic 56key split is still only about as big as a 10keyless. I waste more space putting my note pad and food in between the two halves.
It's an comparatively ancient keyboard, 10 years old now probably, and it was my first, so I didn't really know what I wanted re switches and caps. It's so old its all hand soldered, no hot swapping. I do like you, periodically peek around at splits to upgrade but I think I will have to go down the custom PCB route to really get what I want.
At least now most are starting to ditch TRRS interconnect cables for USB-C which never made much sense to me. At the bottom end I could believe, 10 years ago, that maybe the USBC parts were more expensive and the extra $2 wasn't worth it (I dont agree but I follow the reasoning...), but the ZSA Moonlander sells for $360 USD and still uses a TRRS. Imagine melting $180 because you plugged the cables in the wrong order!? At that price it just seems lazy, or cheap, or that you actually don't have the engineering skills to build a product and are just reselling cobbled together opensource designs. (Edit: Their new keyboard the Voyager from a year or two ago also still uses TRRS!) The SOL was pretty ahead of its time for some reason on that front.
Though I think if I make my own I might go with a RJ11 for aesthetics.
I recommend the glove 80 for split ortholinear mechanical keyboards. It’s got plenty of of keys for coding. Also you can mount it to camera tripods and actually use it when tilted which really improves ergonomic factor.
I have the Kinesis Advantage 360 which is split but has all the non-numpad buttons.
I do spend lots of time in Emacs, but also use it for plenty of gaming. Just remap in-game to ESDF and only use the left hand. (Or set up layers, but I'm generally too lazy for that).
I think the thumb clusters are great, but may not be to your taste. I'm very happy with it, but have used various iterations of kinesis keyboards for a long time now.
If you’re looking at custom design, there’s plenty of everything.
The column stagger is quite good though, especially to make up for the little finger being shorter.
Fewer buttons is a less obvious improvement, but it does help to reduce hand movement. I’m programming and gaming just fine without F keys or a number row, for example. And there are good commercial designs that have such keys, like the Glove 80.
I use an ergodox EZ, due to a severe injury in my 20s. Frequently used symbols are on some of the extra keys, less frequently used ones are accessed via a shift combo. By week 2 I was faster on it than a QWERTY keyboard. I don't game on it.
You can already find Corne-inspired keyboards with these features, but up until the introduction of this Toucan design, you couldn't find a Corne keyboard with all those features together.
I've been using the UHK with a trackball thumb module[1]. I haven't touched a mouse since I got it. It's not as eye catching and futuristic, nor wireless, but a sturdy keyboard and it paid for itself by not having to go to physiotherapy for the past five years (for RSI).
Mode feedback is the only thing I can think of, especially when you're getting used to the keyboard and/or have mode toggles set up. I don't have much use for my keyboard screens personally. Cool place to put a logo I guess.
Probably has to do with a decade of hobbyist keyboard culture centered around separate small-batch group buys where specialized switches, keycaps, and boards and maybe even stabilizers.
> is it common to price them without key caps and switches?
Yes, it is for the enthusiast mechanical keyboard community. Everybody has their own preferences for switches and keycaps and there are hundreds of varieties of both.
It's a shame that trackpoints never caught on outside of the thinkpad crowd. I rarely see them get used for custom keyboards, even though they are IMO the perfect fit for a use case like this.
Yes, I'd love more custom keyboards with a trackpoints. There are the Tex ones, but that's pretty much it. And there are many layouts these days that would easily allow for one to fit and still be able to use keycap sets that don't need to have specialized keys carved out of them like the Tex boards. Every time I see an Alice layout I just dream about a nubbin stuck in the open space between the G and the H.
Strictly for BeeKeeb: I got my Corne kit from beekeeb several years ago and I'd happily buy from them again. I was a total custom-keyboard-and-soldering newbie and they helped me figure out what I needed, what I was missing, and even sent me extra parts for the trickier bits.
And <$200 for this combination of features is shocking. I'd have probably been a instant buy if I was in the market for a minimal split.
Absolutely love these type of keyboards. But ... with how much security I work with for logins, etc, the fingerprint button on my Mac keyboards are amazing time savers that I don't want to live without. Has anyone found a workaround?
I get that it's fully programmable, but can someone explain how you type numbers and the symbols that are on number keys on this keyboard? I didn't see any keycaps for them, and couldn't find any docs on where the symbols live.
EDIT ADDED: I'm guessing maybe there is a control that causes other symbols to become visible on the keycaps, replacing the default A-Z symbols, and they never show those alternate symbols in the photos because we're supposed to know it does that.
Why? Well, I really admire Jonas Heitala's documentation of his journey to find a layout that fit his aesthetic: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2023/11/02/i_designed_my_ow... . My layout isn't as extreme, it's still qwerty-ish, but I've been heavily inspired by his thorough analysis.
Wireless keyboards (like the one linked) typically use ZMK instead to my knowledge. It's similar to QMK—so much of the knowledge still applies—but it isn't 1:1.
Other symbols don't appear on the keycaps just like there's only an upper or a lowercase letter on each key on your keyboard. Your keyboard also doesn't tell you there's ¶ or ‡ underneath the 7 key!
Layers sound pretty crazy but if you start slow and adapt towards them, they're just amazingly useful.
These let you type every character/key combo without awkward pinky stretches.
A somewhat bespoke layer usecase that I find valuable as a programmer is holding "S" on my left hand sets characters hjkl; to the open-surround characters like ({[<
Some examples of how this can be accomplished:
- double tap some key
- hold some key
- layers (tapping a particular key changes what all keys do)
- holding multiple keys (combo)
It’s programmable so you can change what key interactions cause a certain output.
I feel like there should be a sign on the home page saying "you have to be at least this (arrow pointing at a height) cool to buy this keyboard"
If you don't already know how this kind of keyboard works, we don't care about you and won't bother explaining it to you because you're obviously not worth selling to if you don't already know how a programmable 42 key keyboard works.
You have to pick keycaps, and switches, and maybe buy extra keycaps for some reason. We're not going to tell you why extra keycaps are important or useful, but you should probably buy them anyway for some reason.
I'm pretty sure they would have sold me at least one keyboard, maybe several, if they'd bothered to put even 5 minutes thought into non-keyboard-hipster customers, but I'm clearly not cool enough with my multiple kinesis keyboards, chording keyboards, and mechanical keyboards.
I'm not a keyboard hipster, I'm just a guy who had RSI and doesn't want it again. People like me do actually buy keyboards.
Super minimal finger travel. I have a 34-key layout personally, and while I give up the F-keys, everything else is not very difficult to access and I really love how little my fingers move.
Having tried a few, I think the Kinesis contoured keyboards are a sweet spot. Plenty of keys, but finger movement feels really close. Keep coming back to my old Kinesis Advantages or similar custom builds.
Yes. I full time code on a corne and notice only improvements to ergonomics. Once you memorize the layers it's superior because your layers can place brackets without reaching. All those special characters we use all the time are on -- or close to -- the home row.
But there are no such improvements due to this. On a bigger keyboard you can do all the same layers, but also use those extra keys for something less frequent - it still is easier to remember a physically dedicated key position for some action than via layering
having gotten over the learning curve, i definitely prefer it over conventional keyboards, but would i recommend it to 99.9% of people? no. people who use these kinds of keyboards have either 1. extremely niche problems, or 2. find intrinsic value in novelty, aesthetics, or diy/experimentation
Also an everyday Corne user and I agree with this take but I'd also suggest that programmers do tend to have very niche problems. They have to type lots and lots of symbols that aren't super accessible on a normal keyboard.
If you're also a productivity nerd who likes keyboard shortcuts and whatnot, these types of keyboards give you (perhaps counterintuitively) a lot more freedom to experiment.
I do! Obviously you can create a 42-key layout on a larger keyboard, but reducing the key count forces you onto a layout that minimizes awkward finger travel. I can (and do) use a 42-key all day long without pain whereas MacBook Pro keyboards now will irritate me within a few hours.
I started building Dactyl and got bored very quickly, then went back to my Logitech Ergo K860. K860 is $40-50 brand-new (classic eBay auctions), and I got the MX Ergo Plus mouse next to it. This is a proper working combo. I have 20+ keyboards collecting dust in my wardrobe, and this combo was the only one to win. All under $150 combined. I also got razer wireless control hub to make sound control easier ($50).
TLDR; these small split keyboards are so expensive. $190-500 range. Weird.
I was very excited when ortholinear keyboards started to catch on, but then something happened and this ultra-minimalist stuff started pouring out with column staggering and now once again long for someone to make a good ortholinear split keyboard with all of the proper buttons it should have for being actually useful for software development or gaming.
Do all of the users of these just spend their time in vim? I cannot fathom how they’re used otherwise.
Yeah I have a split, a RGBKB Sol.
It's got full letters + numbers + what you'd expect in terms of tab/ctrl/shift/meta/etc, 2 thumbs and some 4 extra inner keys for macros or whatever (mirrored on both sides).
It's great. I have a symbol layer so most stuff is on the home row, but I can easily play games without having werido layers or incantations (besides swapping from colemak to qwerty). Having the extra keys means I dont need any combo-layers etc. It's just uh, very practical... You can always just have tighter "everyday" layering if you dont want movement, but without the physical keys you seem to drastically cut out any options.
I never understood going super small unless you are traveling and take it everywhere with your laptop or have super tight desk space. Even then, my enormous huge gigantic 56key split is still only about as big as a 10keyless. I waste more space putting my note pad and food in between the two halves.
It's an comparatively ancient keyboard, 10 years old now probably, and it was my first, so I didn't really know what I wanted re switches and caps. It's so old its all hand soldered, no hot swapping. I do like you, periodically peek around at splits to upgrade but I think I will have to go down the custom PCB route to really get what I want.
At least now most are starting to ditch TRRS interconnect cables for USB-C which never made much sense to me. At the bottom end I could believe, 10 years ago, that maybe the USBC parts were more expensive and the extra $2 wasn't worth it (I dont agree but I follow the reasoning...), but the ZSA Moonlander sells for $360 USD and still uses a TRRS. Imagine melting $180 because you plugged the cables in the wrong order!? At that price it just seems lazy, or cheap, or that you actually don't have the engineering skills to build a product and are just reselling cobbled together opensource designs. (Edit: Their new keyboard the Voyager from a year or two ago also still uses TRRS!) The SOL was pretty ahead of its time for some reason on that front.
Though I think if I make my own I might go with a RJ11 for aesthetics.
I recommend the glove 80 for split ortholinear mechanical keyboards. It’s got plenty of of keys for coding. Also you can mount it to camera tripods and actually use it when tilted which really improves ergonomic factor.
I have the Kinesis Advantage 360 which is split but has all the non-numpad buttons.
I do spend lots of time in Emacs, but also use it for plenty of gaming. Just remap in-game to ESDF and only use the left hand. (Or set up layers, but I'm generally too lazy for that).
I think the thumb clusters are great, but may not be to your taste. I'm very happy with it, but have used various iterations of kinesis keyboards for a long time now.
If you’re looking at custom design, there’s plenty of everything.
The column stagger is quite good though, especially to make up for the little finger being shorter.
Fewer buttons is a less obvious improvement, but it does help to reduce hand movement. I’m programming and gaming just fine without F keys or a number row, for example. And there are good commercial designs that have such keys, like the Glove 80.
You can still get larger split ortho keyboards with stuff like Function keys. Check something like https://keeb.io/collections/keyboards
I'm not sure you'll find a proper full-sized spilt ortho keyboard - with numpad, arrows, etc - without building it yourself at least.
I use an ergodox EZ, due to a severe injury in my 20s. Frequently used symbols are on some of the extra keys, less frequently used ones are accessed via a shift combo. By week 2 I was faster on it than a QWERTY keyboard. I don't game on it.
More expensive for what you get, but I've had my ZSA Moonlander Mark I for a few years and really enjoy it.
You can already find Corne-inspired keyboards with these features, but up until the introduction of this Toucan design, you couldn't find a Corne keyboard with all those features together.
- Wireless
- Integrated pointing device
- Aligned 1u thumb keys
- E-ink screen
- Aluminium plate
- Below $200
I'm interested for sure. Thanks for sharing.
Once you get the presoldered board it is ~$300. I'm not into keyboards, is it common to price them without key caps and switches? I noticed that.
I'm not sure I see the e-ink screen as useful, but that touchpad caught my eye. What do people use that screen for?
I've been using the UHK with a trackball thumb module[1]. I haven't touched a mouse since I got it. It's not as eye catching and futuristic, nor wireless, but a sturdy keyboard and it paid for itself by not having to go to physiotherapy for the past five years (for RSI).
[1] https://uhk.io/product/trackball
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Yes very common. Most places sell without caps and switches.
Mode feedback is the only thing I can think of, especially when you're getting used to the keyboard and/or have mode toggles set up. I don't have much use for my keyboard screens personally. Cool place to put a logo I guess.
Yes, unfortunately it is.
Probably has to do with a decade of hobbyist keyboard culture centered around separate small-batch group buys where specialized switches, keycaps, and boards and maybe even stabilizers.
> is it common to price them without key caps and switches?
Yes, it is for the enthusiast mechanical keyboard community. Everybody has their own preferences for switches and keycaps and there are hundreds of varieties of both.
Closer to calculator LCDs than e-ink technically. I know, it's a nitpick, but real e-ink is such a wonderful technology.
i love my corne, it's such a joy to use.
Fancy keyboard are like lingerie, the less material there is the more it costs.
And battery not included on this one, so it like “model not included”
It's a shame that trackpoints never caught on outside of the thinkpad crowd. I rarely see them get used for custom keyboards, even though they are IMO the perfect fit for a use case like this.
The Datahand-inspired Svalboard provides up to two trackpoints for those who are open to something radical: https://svalboard.com/
Also available with up to two trackballs or touchpads.
The UHK80 has a trackpoint module that works great!
Thank you so much you might’ve saved my life. I‘ve been having issues with my pinkies for a while now, but I couldn’t leave trackpoint.
Will try this out, if its still possible to buy
One question, is it weird when the trackpoint is used with the thumb instead of the pointing finger?
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Beyond the UHK keyboards there are others with trackpoints
TEX had a whole line https://tex.com.tw/products/shura
The classic Happy Hackers Keyboard has one. https://hhkeyboard.us/hhkb-studio/product
And Lenovo itself offers several usb keyboards with TrackPoint https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F3U4TQS
I've had two of those Lenovo keyboards, beware the USB connector gets damaged ridiculously easily.
I wonder whether the modern ThinkPad enthusiasts are actually only TrackPoint enthusiasts.
(Previously, the keyboard, durability, and repairability were also ThinkPad selling points for enthusiasts.)
Yes. Although the keyboard is decent, until you get a grain of salt under a key.
The durability is mediocre, and repairability is only better than an iPhone.
Yes, I'd love more custom keyboards with a trackpoints. There are the Tex ones, but that's pretty much it. And there are many layouts these days that would easily allow for one to fit and still be able to use keycap sets that don't need to have specialized keys carved out of them like the Tex boards. Every time I see an Alice layout I just dream about a nubbin stuck in the open space between the G and the H.
How do people find these trackpads? I’ve seen them or at least similar in the Kyria at al keyboards[0] and am intrigued but suspicious too.
[0] https://splitkb.com/collections/keyboard-kits
Strictly for BeeKeeb: I got my Corne kit from beekeeb several years ago and I'd happily buy from them again. I was a total custom-keyboard-and-soldering newbie and they helped me figure out what I needed, what I was missing, and even sent me extra parts for the trickier bits.
And <$200 for this combination of features is shocking. I'd have probably been a instant buy if I was in the market for a minimal split.
Absolutely love these type of keyboards. But ... with how much security I work with for logins, etc, the fingerprint button on my Mac keyboards are amazing time savers that I don't want to live without. Has anyone found a workaround?
This kind of thing is the only way I know of: https://hackaday.com/2022/12/26/standalone-touch-id-for-your...
I get that it's fully programmable, but can someone explain how you type numbers and the symbols that are on number keys on this keyboard? I didn't see any keycaps for them, and couldn't find any docs on where the symbols live.
EDIT ADDED: I'm guessing maybe there is a control that causes other symbols to become visible on the keycaps, replacing the default A-Z symbols, and they never show those alternate symbols in the photos because we're supposed to know it does that.
Many keyboards use the qmk firmware these days, qmk.fm, which can be programmed with the Vial configurator, get.vial.today .
Here's one typical qwerty-ish layout for 42 keys: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...
And for something more weird but still fully featured, Miryoku is a fairly common micro-keyboard layout, https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku .
Why? Well, I really admire Jonas Heitala's documentation of his journey to find a layout that fit his aesthetic: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2023/11/02/i_designed_my_ow... . My layout isn't as extreme, it's still qwerty-ish, but I've been heavily inspired by his thorough analysis.
Wireless keyboards (like the one linked) typically use ZMK instead to my knowledge. It's similar to QMK—so much of the knowledge still applies—but it isn't 1:1.
https://zmk.dev/
The key cap legends don’t change. You need to touch type to use it.
Other symbols don't appear on the keycaps just like there's only an upper or a lowercase letter on each key on your keyboard. Your keyboard also doesn't tell you there's ¶ or ‡ underneath the 7 key!
Layers sound pretty crazy but if you start slow and adapt towards them, they're just amazingly useful.
Putting all your modifier keys on the homerow is probably the most immediately understandable use of layers: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods
These let you type every character/key combo without awkward pinky stretches.
A somewhat bespoke layer usecase that I find valuable as a programmer is holding "S" on my left hand sets characters hjkl; to the open-surround characters like ({[<
If you don't know why you need to buy caps/switches separately, this isn't marketed at you. There are lots of options that are.
Furthermore, you're looking at a shop... why would a shop listing hold your hand about the topic the product you're looking at is in?
Some examples of how this can be accomplished: - double tap some key - hold some key - layers (tapping a particular key changes what all keys do) - holding multiple keys (combo)
It’s programmable so you can change what key interactions cause a certain output.
I feel like there should be a sign on the home page saying "you have to be at least this (arrow pointing at a height) cool to buy this keyboard"
If you don't already know how this kind of keyboard works, we don't care about you and won't bother explaining it to you because you're obviously not worth selling to if you don't already know how a programmable 42 key keyboard works.
You have to pick keycaps, and switches, and maybe buy extra keycaps for some reason. We're not going to tell you why extra keycaps are important or useful, but you should probably buy them anyway for some reason.
I'm pretty sure they would have sold me at least one keyboard, maybe several, if they'd bothered to put even 5 minutes thought into non-keyboard-hipster customers, but I'm clearly not cool enough with my multiple kinesis keyboards, chording keyboards, and mechanical keyboards.
I'm not a keyboard hipster, I'm just a guy who had RSI and doesn't want it again. People like me do actually buy keyboards.
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> 42 keys
It is a nice looking keyboard but do people find value in such minimal layouts?
Super minimal finger travel. I have a 34-key layout personally, and while I give up the F-keys, everything else is not very difficult to access and I really love how little my fingers move.
Having tried a few, I think the Kinesis contoured keyboards are a sweet spot. Plenty of keys, but finger movement feels really close. Keep coming back to my old Kinesis Advantages or similar custom builds.
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Yes. I full time code on a corne and notice only improvements to ergonomics. Once you memorize the layers it's superior because your layers can place brackets without reaching. All those special characters we use all the time are on -- or close to -- the home row.
But there are no such improvements due to this. On a bigger keyboard you can do all the same layers, but also use those extra keys for something less frequent - it still is easier to remember a physically dedicated key position for some action than via layering
yeah, i type on a corne everyday: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...
having gotten over the learning curve, i definitely prefer it over conventional keyboards, but would i recommend it to 99.9% of people? no. people who use these kinds of keyboards have either 1. extremely niche problems, or 2. find intrinsic value in novelty, aesthetics, or diy/experimentation
Also an everyday Corne user and I agree with this take but I'd also suggest that programmers do tend to have very niche problems. They have to type lots and lots of symbols that aren't super accessible on a normal keyboard.
If you're also a productivity nerd who likes keyboard shortcuts and whatnot, these types of keyboards give you (perhaps counterintuitively) a lot more freedom to experiment.
I do! Obviously you can create a 42-key layout on a larger keyboard, but reducing the key count forces you onto a layout that minimizes awkward finger travel. I can (and do) use a 42-key all day long without pain whereas MacBook Pro keyboards now will irritate me within a few hours.
Love the innovation. Relatively happy with my Lily 58 with the exception of the case. Switches keep popping out of the edges.
What battery does it need?
What level of n-key roll over does it support. Ie. can I steno on this keyboard?
Glad to see more touchpads. Apple magic trackpad needs some serious competition.
I started building Dactyl and got bored very quickly, then went back to my Logitech Ergo K860. K860 is $40-50 brand-new (classic eBay auctions), and I got the MX Ergo Plus mouse next to it. This is a proper working combo. I have 20+ keyboards collecting dust in my wardrobe, and this combo was the only one to win. All under $150 combined. I also got razer wireless control hub to make sound control easier ($50).
TLDR; these small split keyboards are so expensive. $190-500 range. Weird.
it’s the manual labour and small runs that make them expensive. adjusted for inflation the ibm model m keyboard would be 830 usd in 2023 money.
Many of these ergo keyboards are open source, too, so if you have more time than money you can just order some cheap PCBs and assemble them yourself.