Custom keycaps: current options for one-off custom set?

[vometia]

Due to the sporadic nature of me being here (which is itself largely down to the sporadic nature of how bad my insomnia is!) I'm terrible at keeping up. And remembering stuff; while I could search, by the time I finally think "oh yeah, I should do that", things have often moved on as it can be months or years. So that's kinda my starting position!

Keycaps, because you can never have enough. Or something like that. MX-compatible, obvs., though Model M compatible would definitely be an option.

A current project I'm doing involves retyping bits of Cyrillic and I've decided that yazhert (i.e. ЯЖЕРТetc) is my preferred layout. I suspect an unconscious bias to whatever is least available, so of the few Cyrillic keysets I've found, none caters for that. Just to make sure it's an impossibility, it would also need to be ISO, and also also need to be UK ISO, so none of that faffing about with reversing " and @.¹ And it would need to be SA profile or similar: I hate non-sculpted keys like DSA as much as I hate the ANSI layout. Of course much of that is irrelevant if I can find caps for my M, so that's an option.

Oh, and they would need to be double-shots, nice heavy ones in fancy colours that I'm ambiguous about, be available tomorrow and cost about 23p. I think that guarantees impossibility. More seriously, I'm aware that whatever option I look at (if there are any that are realistically available) would arrive long after I've finished my current project. But want anyway, as you do, even though don't really need.

Any suggestions of what options might be available to me? I suspect for MX caps I'm going to need to sacrifice things like colours, weight and definitely double-shot, nobody is going to do that for a one-off. I'd prefer not to sacrifice SA (or similar) but I think I'm going to be looking for at best dye-sub so that'll limit me to dark-on-light.

Edit:

[1] This also depends on me figuring out how to customise Linux Mint's available keyboard layouts as used by Cinnamon, which is a problem for elsewhere, but it seems less than keen to divulge its secrets. That said, I may be migrating away from Mint for various reasons anyway (well, for one reason, which is systemd), just to make it even less relevant.

[Hak Foo]

Signature Plastics now does one-off dyesubs on SA profile, but they're expensive (USD5/cap) and limited to a set of standard designs, so you might not be able to get the legends you want. I'm not sure how amenable they are to extending their catalogue.

https://pimpmykeyboard.com/sa-p-individ ... ated-keys/

[vometia]

Signature Plastics now does one-off dyesubs on SA profile, but they're expensive (USD5/cap) and limited to a set of standard designs, so you might not be able to get the legends you want. I'm not sure how amenable they are to extending their catalogue.

I suppose it can't hurt to ask, I've found PMK quite friendly when I've approached them previously about their existing keysets even if I did manage to completely confuse them! Looking at the range and prices I suspect the answer will be either a) very expensive or b) no but I should at least ask.

[mmm]

You can also go a DIY route for dyesubbing. Other membes have good experience with Etsy for this, but it should also be fairly doable at home without expensive equipment, as long as you find some nice PBT blanks. Haven't attempted to do this myself yet, but it looks tempting, if you can find someone with a dye-sub printer.

[Bjerrk]

That said, I may be migrating away from Mint for various reasons anyway (well, for one reason, which is systemd), just to make it even less relevant.

I hope you don't mind me off-topic'ing a bit, but do you have your eye on any particular systemd free distribution(s)?

[Rayndalf]

Unicomp prints custom keycap sets for very fair prices, so buckling spring keycaps might be your best bet.

[vometia]

You can also go a DIY route for dyesubbing. Other membes have good experience with Etsy for this, but it should also be fairly doable at home without expensive equipment, as long as you find some nice PBT blanks. Haven't attempted to do this myself yet, but it looks tempting, if you can find someone with a dye-sub printer.

Mu posted something about this a while back. I should try to find his post as that might be my best option; I think the only thing that put me off was having to do my own SVGs and just thinking about InkScape gives me a headache, but y'know.

I hope you don't mind me off-topic'ing a bit, but do you have your eye on any particular systemd free distribution(s)?

I don't mind given that I habitually indulge in not sticking to the point. It's just that I don't have much to add at the moment; I haven't looked into it on the basis that once I do, I'll probably just get on with it until it's done, so it's potentially quite a big commitment. I should probably fire up a VM or a spare PC before I set to work in case it goes wrong though.

My first choice would've been FreeBSD as I use it on my server anyway but I've found that stuff like Linux Mint is better focussed at desktop users in that most stuff "just works" right out of the box that was more of a struggle with FreeBSD, like automounting hot-plug devices and such; though that may be a poor example as it appears to work fairly seamlessly now, but I recall there were quite a slew of minor irritations, each one of which was potentially a significant effort to fix. But it's hard to say how much of that is the OS (by which I mean kernel+userland) and how much is the desktop. While I may prefer the look, feel and functionality of KDE and like the way it's much more configurable, I appreciate that Cinnamon "just works" and it's close enough to what I want. I also gave that a try on FreeBSD but it wouldn't compile. Which is admittedly not much of "a try".

tl;dr: dunno. IIRC there's at least one Ubuntu derivative that doesn't use systemd so I'll probably look at that once I'm ready.

Unicomp prints custom keycap sets for very fair prices, so buckling spring keycaps might be your best bet.

Never thought about that. I've ordered coloured keycaps from them in the fairly distant past but assumed they were like PMK in that you needed to choose from a selection of existing designs. But that'd work out quite nicely as the SSKs are my preferred "other keyboard" unless I go shopping again.

[luella]

You can also go a DIY route for dyesubbing. Other membes have good experience with Etsy for this, but it should also be fairly doable at home without expensive equipment, as long as you find some nice PBT blanks. Haven't attempted to do this myself yet, but it looks tempting, if you can find someone with a dye-sub printer.

Well, I have already tried it myself. Below are the images of my project:









I hope they provide a better idea of how they actually work.

[Zobeid Zuma]

Just a reminder, WASD offer true custom-printed, full-color keycap sets. They appear to be inkjet printed and then coated with a layer of tough, UV-cured resin. Also, they are *thin* ABS, but the molding is actually quite sharp and high quality. So, they aren't made to last forever, but they hold up decently. You can download a template from their website, create your entire keycap set using Inkscape (which is not that hard to learn, I promise!), then send it to them for printing.

It's been a while, but I had a custom set made in this way, and I was quite happy with how it came out.