Keyboard Builders' Digest /
Typing in the upside down
Will Pucket writes about experimenting with smaller boards and collaging layouts, trying to make his board fulfill its promise of comfort.
Published February 27, 2025
Hi, I'm Will. I've had a life long fascination with type. My love of vintage boards probably grew from playing Oregon Trail on the Apple //e during summers as a child. Type possesses an inherent beauty for me. I enjoy IPA, LaTeX and mathematical typesetting. I mainly type English prose and TypeScript, with a healthy dose of hotkeys.
Type is a traversal, each board weaving a story.
I've been busy experimenting with smaller boards, oscillating between 26 and 28 keys, and collaging layouts while trying to coax my board to make good on the promise of comfort. Deepening the dialogue between my fingers and the letters they type has been an ongoing, at times consumptive, amble. Roll here, reach there… JUMP! To seek to make an instrument that is pleasing surely says something about the stories we hope to tell.
A few of the more interesting petals of my keyboard's story began unfurling last fall. I started working with a 'smaller' layout called ehrbl. I had been feeling like the 42 keys I was on previously was just enormous, and at a hardware level, I wanted to do a direct board with a Xiao. I eventually settled on trying a split 28 key physical layout, but when the boards arrived, I couldn't determine how to change the start address of ZMK, even with OpenOCD, thwarting my best laid plan to coopt RST for my 14th key. I took this as a message to try a 26 key layout. A late arrival to the world of combos, I began using them as I prepared for the smaller board and was surprised by how intuitive the fingering was; my brain seemed to perceive them more as an additional key than a cognitively burdensome layer I had to toggle or switch. So I comboed B & V, and all seemed well. At first….
But as my speed came up to temperature, I found the combo timing not working as well as I had hoped (I am an admittedly sloppy-rolly typist). I was also discovering that my logical layout (Engram at the time) was not fitting the 26 key board as neatly as I had imagined. It took a couple of months of ottering around with key numbers and layout fluidity. Returning to 28 keys and inspired by hexapod, I poured over data sheets to find the lowest power dissipation one and then two pair diodes as I tried to remain battery conscious (ROHM Semi's UMP1NTR has exceeded my hopes though still falls short of direct performance). I reorganized my matrix for compatibility with RMK.
Ergonomics means you
My left hand is not so expressive, and my left pinky can be down right cranky. I was trying to wring the ulnar deviation out of my layouts at all levels, and I wasn't sure I even had a reachy pinky available to me. During this window, I started 3D printing physical layouts and populating them with switches to test. Definitely not the first to do this, I wish I had done so sooner. I went through some 25+ iterations of various boards, some well known, others ergogen adjustments of what seemed oh-so-close, but still I couldn't get to something that felt, even if not 'good' to my hand, at least inoffensive. Modeling the hand's anatomy is so complex, and every time I thought I had corrected a problem, a new one sprouted as a result elsewhere. Then it occurred to me, perhaps it wasn't that complex, maybe it was just multi-variable…
So I made study of hands, a single column keyboard in ergogen. I printed 8 of these and populated them with switches and magnets, and then, using my soldering mat's base plate, pushed them around individually. Within a few minutes I was able to find a comfortable position that allowed me to reach bottom, home, and top rows with both pinkies. I then scanned the plate, and measured spread, stagger and splay values to plug into ergogen for sessile.
As I introspected on this process, the old yellow pages slogan came to mind:
Let your fingers do the walking.
I wouldn't have picked the broadly spaced layout I came up with at all. I tend to idealize closely spaced, parallel columns. Visually, I get overwhelmed with combos on a keymap, but in practice I prefer them to layers. Hmmm. My mind floats to a chic keyboard shop built in a shipping container where I can do the typing equivalent of a blind taste test…
Route setting
I'm prone to early adoption. So when I was sorting through choosing a logical/functional layout for the 4 column boards, it made perfect sense to me to test out Nordrassil. It seemed fitting to use a layout named after a (albeit) mythical tree on a keyboard shaped like a leaf. Nordrassil has a pleasant enough flow, but repositioning its higher frequency inner column meant a lot of higher frequency combos that I couldn't get to scale up speed wise, and I felt like I was at a hard wall at 60 wpm. Surprisingly, the queasy feeling I had come to accept as something I would always have in my left hand when typing was noticibly lessened. I was unsure of whether this was due to differences in character frequency or more complex adjacent bigrams. Engram's I-G scissor was not a good choice for my anatomy, but I had been unable to successfully relocate G without derailing the layout. Nordrassil was my gateway to the thumb alpha, which was quickly becoming a necessity on a board of the size I was using.
I had cruised around serotonin/caster, but I was trying to avoid spending a lot of time learning a new layout (Nordrassil had been largely appealing to me due to it's similarity to Engram, which I was on previously). In particular, flip flopping the vowel cluster to the right hand seemed like a enormous jump to me, with little reward. But, the numbers were good, and with the extra time around the holidays…
The first week proved brutal: imagine a wallop of battery-acid flavored chewing gum with every keypress. But as I started to use the layout, I found (slowly) joy. Yes, joy in prose (E-N-O-U-G-H is still a blast every time), but also in navigability. Finger holds for windowing began to appear on a single hand. I had relocated the numpad to the left hand, and began to see my right hand staying substantially more on my trackpad while drawing and modeling. With most of the consonants on the left hand, almost all my Blender and KiCad hotkeys were organized functionally for me. While I had selected the layout for its high scores and markedly low center column usage in order to fit my board, I had happened into a layout optimized for my primary non-prose activities.
Embracing inversion
I become so accustomed to left-hand-on-keyboard right-hand-on-trackpad, that the few times I need an H or A hotkey seem preposterous. So, one morning, inspired and feeling finally a little more playful with the sense of inversion, I decide to try giving my keyboard an "insane mode": a reverse/mirrored alpha layer. It's half Stranger Things upside down, half Dr. Strange mirror dimension. I can hit it as an OSL, or use a tap-dance to 'trap' myself in it. In my mind, the keyboard makes a manual transmission sound as I do the upside down tap dance, and I am sonic the hedgehog seemingly suspended in a loop of track…
The calendar turns and I begin rock climbing with a friend. The focus on path is enchanting. I imagine a small piece of rope around my fingers as I type, tracing the through line of my thoughts. The openness built into my keyboard is overlaid onto the wall as my hands spread across holds, as my dangling t-rex scale forearms burn from each new challenge. Still, there is a queasy-ness in my left hand at times, or if not exactly still in it, sitting off in the wings, staring at me like an anxious stage manager.
It's surprisingly challenging for me to articulate exactly what movements are uncomfortable. I flip-flop period and comma. They had moved inward when I tired of the TL2 O BL1 K scissor I had been living with. It created a pinky ring scissor K I, but felt a lot smoother overall, and along with magic-ing sticky shift to space (and later to comma), clearing column 1-3 adjacent horizontal combos from the home row, and removing the RPI on my alpha combo, my hand isn't twisting outward as much, and my errors keep dropping. Back on cyanophage despite more pressing concerns (can't stop the muse), I don't remember what motivates it, but I reorganize my bottom consonant row and there are gains. The area had been feeling busy, like I was trying to do cat's cradle, but getting something twisted, flipping a bight the wrong direction or something and missing the tie. VWGM becomes VGMW, and the queasy-ness steps further into the darkness of the wing. I think it may have been the LB3 W interacting with the LM4 C in especially WHICH (like Engram's XC), although widening the GL bigram is no doubt more comfortable. It seems that when my body becomes twisted, my words so much more easily lose their orientation.
I have long been captivated by traversal. Whether touring, climbing, or even just a walk around the lake, I'm fascinated by the way my mind regards the places I go, even when it's only my fingers doing the walking. So, it's no wonder the transformation of the stream of letters I type every day as they come screaming into words catches my attention. Other days, I come to my board wanting only more speed & power, more accuracy, more productivity. Getting myself to be willing to play with type is perhaps the most difficult challenge for me, but it is not until the mind embraces a quality of play that the brain can reorganize itself.
| Will Pucket (44) |
|---|---|
| Handle | willpuckett |
| Location | San Francisco, US |
| Description | I work with paths and try to make shapes. |
| Joined (the hobby) | 2022 |
| Niche | comfort, vintage Apple boards |
| Fav. switch | Ambient Twilights (35G), Sunsets |
| Fav. keycap profile | KLP-Lame |
| Other hobbies | dimensional accuracy (DA), probing, cycling, climbing, paths |
| Links | smote.io, octule.com |
Published on Thu 27th Feb 2025. Featured in KBD #187.
Related
Colemak-DH progress data
Colemak-DH progress data in 10 weeks by hocusparibus.
Switching to Colemak
The main stages and impressions of Tanukishouten switching to Colemak during the holidays.
artsey and ardux.io
ardux.io is the community version of the artsey layout – one hand, 8 keys, 100% power.
Pome76
As standard as this row-staggered keyboard looks like, Jamie Ding's Pome76 behaves like a "unibody ergo". How?
Qazikat
A clever PCB with two different layout options, one on each side: Qazikat by weteor.