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1 year agoIf you haven’t been tainted by the mechanical keyboard hobby, be aware.
I started with a TKL with Outemu blue switches just to see what the hype was about, then moved to Anne Pro 2 with Gat browns.
Ortholinear made sense so I got an XD75 followed my a Planck after getting curious about 40% boards.
Now I make my own from printed PCBs and soldering, custom programmable firmware, and my own custom key map.
I now use a split column staggered 34 key board with hand dyed keycaps and custom aftermarket switches.
I own 7 boards now and have plans for at least 2 more and a partial split for gaming.
I think for others it’s having different switches and keycaps for different feeling when typing. For me it’s trying to find what I think is the most optimal typing experience and the least amount of strains on my hands while typing.
That’s why I’ve gone from row stagger and qwerty to Ortholinear. I switched to that because it makes sense to me that your fingers move up and down better than they move laterally. Lateral movement like in a row stagger layout is more strain since you have to stretch to reach keys. Qwerty also never made sense to me since alphas aren’t optimized based on location but rather purposefully unoptimized as a hold over from the typewriter days in order to slow down typists to help stop keys from jamming.
When I was on my Ortho boards I learned about layer switching that allows for keys that are further away to be moved under my fingers by activating a second layer. This was when I moved from my 60% Ortho to my 40% Ortho.
After that I got interested in ColemakDh since it fixed a lot of what is wrong with qwerty. So I decided to learn it. Then I got real into column stagger and wanted to try my hand at soldering. I ordered the parts to make a board called a Cantor Remix. I had enough parts to build 2 and did that. Building my own keyboard from basically parts and programming was a lot of fun and I got bit by the bug.
It’s a dumb argument since most people don’t care but I believe that something like a column staggered layout and something like Colemak or Canary should be the standard keyboard format. It’s hard to relearn typing all over again as an adult so the default is an archaic row stagger that feels unnatural and a very unoptimized alpha layout. I know most people just don’t care and I hyper focus on stuff so it’s just something I don’t bother telling most people, unless they ask of course.
I don’t think everyone needs a bunch of keyboards but I’m on this weird journey to find what feels the most optimized for me. I’m deep in the rabbit hole lol.