During my years as a... nerd I guess?.. I've thought many times about my interface to my computer. Being swedish and a developer I think it's quite natural to question the standard of how our keys are layed out and what that means for our own efficiency.

So naturally I made the move to a US keyboard. The fact that most days I write english or code means that having a slightly less optimal access to swedish characters was WELL worth the tradeoff!

But then it all started :)

You see, what felt like unlocking the secret power of accessibility also opened up questioning everything about how I use my fingers and my keyboard. Naturally, the next step became splitting a relatively regular keyboard. I bought the Dygma Raise.. And wow!

Unlocking the use of thumbs was not a bad idea.

I went on using the Dygma raise and a pretty "regular" setup for quite some time, but something inside me still wondered about the overall key layout of a what is called a "staggered" board.

Enter reddit

As with any strange niche there's a few forums to dig deeper in. I started looking around at the impressive keyboards full of customization that people were using and discussing on reddit. Not only is the group welcoming and open, but it reminds me so much of the FOSS community. It's a group of tinkerers, that discuss and evolve things together - schematics for PCBs are shared openly and help is never far away.

So I made the jump! First I bought a smaller keyboard. Well - for normal people it's small, but in this world it is still considered a pretty big board. I still stay around the 50-60 key mark, but many of the initiated move down as small as to 36 keys.

Since then I've done a few iterations back and forth. Smaller, larger, stranger layouts. But I think I've reached a good place now where I can still comfortably swap between my laptop or any regular keyboard and my own without much friction. Since my job means jumping back and forth between my own and other setups, I think that is a good place to stay.

Reaching understanding

In order to make sense out of 36 keys, we have to talk about the thing that is layers.

We all use layers all the time but most of us don't really think about it. Whenever you capitalize a letter you use a layer, by holding shift. Understanding that means that we can now consider maaany possibilities, like a navigation layer, a symbol layer and more. And this is where it starts to get tricky.

For me I keep it simple. My vim navigation becomes regular navigation on a layer. I have media keys on the same layer but the other side of my keyboard - and I have a number/symbol layer just for simple reach. But since I use a larger keyboard I actually have "first hand" access to much of a regular board, just without all the strange movement.

If you enjoy tinkering, personalization, FOSS or just experimenting with your own setup - I cannot recommend at least trying the custom/split/ergo keyboard world out for a bit. It might just open your mind completely ;)

Out.