SL89 wrote: that is rather interesting, is it symmetrical and staggered?
Thank you, the goal was to reduce the width as much as possible and have it still be a standard layout.
Mal-2 wrote:
My only suggestion might be to let the case take up the excess space on the staggered rows, and leave all the alpha keys 1U. The non-1U keys are going to feel subtly different simply due to balance and weight, not to mention that at some point you may wish to try another mapping on the same physical layout.
That is a good suggestion and a problem I hadn't considered. The first prototype would have had 1U keys for Q, A, and O anyway due to the non-availability of caps stepped like that, and looked more like this:
- COLEMAK B.png (49.97 KiB) Viewed 6307 times
I like to design with hat keys because you can always just use a normal key in it's place, since the switch location will be the same:
- COLEMAK C.png (48.99 KiB) Viewed 6307 times
Of course, there is a problem with this design, if you want to reconfigure for QWERTY, then you would have to move Enter down a row, and the switch locations would not be correct.
To get around that, here is a version with 0.75U added to each side of the middle section:
- COLEMAK E.png (53.72 KiB) Viewed 6307 times
Left and right columns are reduced and moved in to compensate for the increased width.
I like the modifier placement better with this design.
With the bottom row modifiers specified as convex, I count 17 distinct key molds would be needed for this. If row 2 and row 4 were the same except flipped, there would be 15. If row 5 concave were the same as row 3, then we're down to 13. If we dispensed with convex keys except for the Space Bar, then we can get down to 11.
That's still a tall order, but any progress would be fantastic!
