Keyboard Builders' Digest / Review
Lexicon review
The Lexicon by WeirdLittleKeebs is a 65% "writing keyboard" designed for wordsmiths – with a layer full of words.
Published February 5, 2025
The Lexicon (or Lexicon 69), this weird little keeb, was made by Ewen Cluney aka nekoewen of, khm, WeirdLittleKeebs. It's a quite interesting 65% keyboard, designed to writing prose, packed with some advanced features. It's open source now, but also available as a kit or pre-built keyboard – starting at $70.
Disclaimer
I featured this project around last summer, and Ewen was kind enough to send me a review unit now, so here are my thoughts after a few days of testing.
I received this keyboard for free. As always, I'm not being paid to write about this product, but receiving a free sample can introduce various biases – both positive and negative in my experience. Keep this in mind while reading this review!
Unboxing
The pre-built Lexicon is ready to use out of the box. No fancy packaging, but it came with two bags of extra keycaps, and two stickers: one of them to label formatting keys. Gateron Yellow switches, MDA caps, no cable, and a basic keycap puller – part of the keycap set I guess.
The extra keycaps of the huge MDA set may come in handy if you want to rearrange the keys – or for a second build. :)
Inspiration
So the original inspiration came while reading Shift Happens. Ewen ended up keeping a running list of keyboard ideas, and the most interesting and useful of these was to make a keyboard aimed at writing prose. The end result is this 65% keyboard with a ton of shortcuts for inputting whole words, common formatting commands, and extended punctuation. This approach results in kind of a steno-light tool that can smoothly integrate chording with regular QWERTY typing.
That said, don't expect instant personal best WPMs, and it won't make you a better writer either. :) As the author put it at the time of introducing the Lexicon:
I just (soft) launched a new keyboard I've been working on for a while […] this keyboard changes the experience of writing while maintaining a standard QWERTY layout […] It can’t make you a better writer, but it does put essential punctuation and shortcuts in easy reach – Ewen.
Check out the user's guide, which details the keyboard's unique features – like the "words" layer, word combos, and more.
Layout
The popular 65% form factor makes a lot of sense on the more classic side of the layout spectrum (if delving into ergo splits seems too scary for you).
Basically, snap an extra column to the right of the good old 60% keyboard. No function row, no numpad, but you have physical arrow keys. That little gap left of the arrow cluster makes navigating between the home row and arrows so much easier! (Or even better, you can set up SpaceFN and forget about dedicated arrow keys.)
That said, the heart of the layout is the three-part split spacebar. Yep, each one fires a space when tapped, and activates a different logical layer when held down.
By default, the leftmost is for various Unicode symbols, the middle one is for the function layer (e.g. F-keys), and the rightmost one is the Words key – with shortcuts producing whole words. The physical arrangement is very comfy, with the middle key positioned at about an equal distance for both thumbs.
Keycaps
You can choose from WoB MDA and a lower profile with translucent legends. (The MDA is out of stock as of writing this.)
Seeing the photos, I was pretty sure this is the same MDA I have in multiple colors. It's a great set with a great profile I'm familiar with, so I went with it. (In addition, since the Lexicon has no per-key LEDs, the translucent set made less sense to me.)
As already mentioned, the original set is huge. You get a ton of extra caps that didn’t make it onto the board – packed in two bags. Also white accents.
Switches
The board came with Gateron Milky Yellow Pro switches, soldered onto the PCB. These budget linears need no introduction – they are widely available, and they've been among the community favorite switch models for ages.
Probably the perfect choice for a pre-built and soldered board.
Build quality and structure
Because of the caseless design – the classic PCB, FR4 plates and stand-offs structure –, the Lexicon has the good old DIY vibe. As already mentioned, the PCB is soldered, so don't look for hotswap sockets.
The red plates and Lexi, the mascot of the Lexicon depicted on the bottom of the base plate, give the whole build a distinct personality.
Build quality? Not perfect, but nothing you can't fix easily with a screwdriver – just some tightening and adjusting of screws and stabilizers. The parcel definitely took a serious beating while crossing the Atlantic.
Otherwise, the caseless design results in a relatively light build and compact overall footprint, at least compared to the similarly 65% Moergo Glitter65 and Chosfox Fox65 – both coming in fancy CNC aluminum cases and featuring similar three-part spacebars.
Keymap
So we've seen a ton of 65% boards, some of them with three-part spacebars, but the uniqueness of the Lexicon lies in the plethora of functions and elaborate keymap.
The Symbol layer relies on Unicode input, and may not work on all platforms. Using Unicode output in Windows require installing a free app called WinCompose. Once it's installed and running, it should recognize Unicode input from the Lexicon. This didn't work for me on an older PC, but wouldn't use most of the symbols of this layer anyway. May come back to this for currency symbols later.
Much more interesting is the Words layer – activated by holding down the rightmost space key – with each letter keys producing a specific word. By default, words are typed without space before or after, so you'll need to add spaces yourself. This allows you to construct various words with building blocks like: "ing/ed", "tion", "ness", still, sometimes I felt it made more sense to automatically add trailing spaces. I mean, strictly statistically, I'm nowhere near to a normal typing speed to talk from experience.
Lots of nice tricks, e.g. holding Shift while using a word shourtcut will give you that word with the first letter capitalized.
But there's even more to the keymap: word combos! Pressing multiple keys simultaneously produces different output. Two-key combos dramatically increase the potential number of usable words, and capitalization works with them too:
Holding Shift and pressing SG will produce "SOMETHING", but pressing S, G, and Shift at the same time produces "Something".
Learning to chord is of course a whole different skill, you can't expect to type in steno after a few hours.
In addition, the majority of frequently used English words are often short enough, so I'm not sure if these shortcuts help a lot. However, pressing SP for "especially", PR for "important", or BC for "because" definitely helps.
On top of all this, the Lexicon has several keys assigned to various hotkeys for common functions in various word processors. In the default firmware they're based on the hotkeys for Microsoft Word on Windows, but there are alternate keymaps and compiled firmware profiles for several other compinations of OS and word processor (Google Docs, Libre Office, Pages). Quick note: localized Windows and Word versions seem to mess up the intended functionality.
The thorough documentation gives you many tips. Here is one of my favorites (I can confirm this):
While the functionality of word shortcuts is useful, it does create exciting new kinds of typos, which you'll want to be aware of when proofreading text written with a Lexicon.
Or a more serious one:
If you know the Lexicon word shortcuts well enough, you can use them as a simple shorthand when writing.
Hm. Great tip.
Other languages
Some functions of the default keymap with English words work only with English OS settings and QWERTY.
E.g. using QWERTZ (Central Europe), you get "plaz" instead of "play", "whz" instead of "why", etc.
At first try, I couldn't for the sake of my life figure out why pressing Space+D results in "donát", which is an absolutely valid Hungarian male name. It's supposed to be "don't" ofc, but the localized Windows remaps the practically unused apostrophe to this frequent national character. I'm sure many other national layouts repurpose that position. German for ä, French for % – just to name a few.
Extras
The Lexicon is one of the few keyboards that has a mascot. If you look at the Lexicon’s bottom plate, you’ll see the artwork of Lexi, the keyboard’s mascot character, by retrotv5000. Lexi is a vivacious young typist from an idealized version of the 1960s, sporting a flip hairstyle and mod dress. Check your packaging for a sticker sheet with Lexi and labels for some keys.
Firmware
The Lexicon uses QMK (and VIA); however, installing the VIA firmware likely means losing some of the advanced features.
There are .uf2 files available with shortcuts for various word processors. (If you are new to this, UF2 is the kind of file that you can just drag and drop to the RP2040 when recognized as a USB storage device.)
All in all, you don't have to learn how to customize the QMK keymap to use the keyboard, especially if you use it for typing in English only, but that's a powerful way to change the keyboard's functionality to your liking.
Conclusion
The Lexicon is a 65% keyboard (open source, pre-built or kit) with a real personality and some DIY vibe – caseless sandwich design. You can't go wrong with the Gateron switches, nor the double-shot MDA caps. The layout makes a lot of sense for someone typing in English and sticking to more classic arrangements. The many features may come in handy for writers for sure. That said, prepare for serious mental gymnastics when getting accustomed to the hybrid typing and chording, and memorizing all the symbols, chords and shortcuts. ;) Adjusting the layout could also pose a real challenge to the less tech-savvy target audience. :) Otherwise, the Lexicon is a great little toy to test all the functionality miraculously packed into a single device.
Availability
While the Lexicon was originally a closed-source product, Ewen just made it open-source a few days ago. In addition, it's available as a pre-build keyboard ($150 $135), ready to use out of the box, or as a kit ($70 $63).
(There's a 10% discount auto-applying at the moment, but the KBDNEWS code should work too if this sale is over.)
- Lexicon product page (pre-built) on Etsy
- Lexicon product page (kit)
- Github: https://github.com/nekoewen/lexicon/
- Lexicon User's Guide
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/nekoewen/status/1806385956175610228
Published on Wed 5th Feb 2025. Featured in KBD #186.
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