Keyboard Builders' Digest
5% off Invokeys' tasty switches!
Keyboard Builders' Digest / Tips & Tricks

16-key layout tour

Looking at Ben Vallack's 16-key layout in detail.

KBD.news
Published March 11, 2022
54 people keep this blog alive for 150,000 readers. Want to join? Thanks to: Schnoor Typography, KEEBD, and Micah Alpern.

Ben Vallack introduces his 16-key layout along with its evolution in a nicely edited video:

In this video I go into some detail about the layout I'm using on my 16 key keyboard. It has taken me a while to get to this point and I think there are now very few barriers to this keyboard being able to sustain pretty fast typing – Ben Vallack.

The main thing that makes this layout so unusual is the way Ben deals with using two layers for the alpha keys. This issue is more complicated than it first seems due to needing to use shifted and non-shifted versions of keys on both layers.

Ben thinks he have eventually come up with a mechanism that seems to work pretty well.

Do you like this post? Share, donate, subscribe, tip me off!

Published on Fri 11th Mar 2022. Featured in KBD #69 (source).


Tags: layouttip

Related

The (Japanese) duplex matrix

There are two completely different keyboard matrices referred to as duplex matrix. Let's examine the Japanese one, which makes possible to handle 160-200 keys with a single Pro Micro.

Numbers in Pnohty

Pnohty 1.2 – an updated layout by u/rayduck with reasonable number arrangement.

Logical Keyboard Layout Design

Apsu shares her experience going from curious about alternate keyboard layouts to accidentally being a prolific layout designer.

Pangaea released

More than a year after the announcement, Pangaea 1.2 with its notoriously flexible layout has been released.

Colemak typewriter

u/bII6 converted an Olympia Splendid 66 typewriter to Colemak.

×
top