BE layout keycaps

[Flox]

Hello everyone,

I'm new on this forum and also a bit new to mechanical keyboards. Recently I bought a cm storm quickfire pro
mainly because it has a belgium layout (it's a bit different than FR layout). Now I've decided that I'm going to buy a filco majestouch 2 tkl but since it has no BE layout, I would go for the UK layout. So my question is: is it possible to find BE layout keycaps for a decent price? I know WASD-keyboards sells custom keycaps but I find them a bit expensive with the shipping costs etc.

Greetings,

Flox

[Muirium]

I know nothing about Belgian caps specifically, but both keyboards should be compatible — they're both Cherry MX, 30 years old today — so you could pull the alphas off the CM and put them on the Filco if you like. Can't say I'm a fan of the Quickfire look, though.

As for new caps, 7bit is organising another group buy on the forum: Round 5. They're tall, spherical doubleshots and the best caps available anywhere, in my opinion. Could you put together your desired layout from amongst these?



Interesting that CM does a Belgian layout model. Hopefully Cherry and other manufacturers do too.

[Flox]

I couldn't put the BE azerty together with those keycaps. Aren't there any company's who also make custom keycaps like WASD-keyboard company does?

(In case u wanted to know, this is a Belgium layout)

[Muirium]

Oooh, now I see. It shares a lot of French AZERTY's features (like the inverted number row which I quite like, numbers are for the numpad!) but with several important modifications (like exclamation mark on the 8 key). Looks like a challenge to put together from any other source than a ready made Belgian cap set.

[Paranoid]

Ah we have another Belgian user, finally! ^^

When I bought my Filco MJ2 I ordered them from wasd when I was just a keyboard novice. I liked the original Filco font better but being lazy I just ordered the standard Belgian layout set. If you design one yourself it might look better. They are prone to getting shiny over time though. But they're good enough for day to day use imo if you don't want the more unique caps to get weared out.

Can you tell us what you find expensive? I payed about €60 for a full size set from wasd. It probably will be less for a TKL set I guess if they have it available. It's mostly the damn custom fees that makes this kind of expensive. But good luck finding any decent belgian azerty keyset in any other way. You can try going to kringloopwinkels or rommelmarkten but you'd have to be really lucky to find a doubleshot or dyesub keyboard. Over the past two years I have acquired some dyesub sets. I also have several lasered sets but I'm not planning on using these. You can still find some lasered sets on 2dehands or kapaza. But even then, you need a modifier pack to complete your set because these don't match and have a different profile than the stock keycaps (OEM vs Cherry vs DCS). The only options there are SP(Signature plastics) or GMK if you want to match the profile. There are always a few Groupbuys going on from Ivan or 7bit. On Geekhack they also offer additional groupbuys.
You can always go for blanks of course, plenty of options there. Or you can buy another CM STORM, harvest the caps and try to sell it here.

Anyways, good luck! Let us know what you end up getting!

[Flox]

Hello there too fellow Belgian

Was it 60 dollar with or without shipping? Cause most of the time it isn't the product itself but the shipping costs that makes it expensive. I would pay like 50 to 60 dollar for a decent keycap set but if there is an additional cost of 20 dollar + , it would not be worth for me. Then I would keep the stock caps or look for other decent alternatives.

Greetings Flox

[Paranoid]

Yeah $60 with shipping included. So that's about €45. But the custom fees were at least €15. So I think it was about €60 total.

[TacticalCoder]

Ah we have another Belgian user, finally! ^^

Oh oh... Webwit better watch out because soon .be is going to invade .nl !

I'm originally from Belgium too and I'm an old member of DT... But then I don't use these abominations that are ISO keyboards and AZERTY layouts

It's ANSI and QWERTY for the win here: more keyboards choice, more keycaps choices... What's not to like !?

(I'm using QWERTY but I do still use right-alt as an additional modifier that said: I use it to input all the accentuated and to do all my window-manager related shortcuts)

[Muirium]

ANSI is my favourite too, and is essentially cost-free for UK English. But isn't it a bother for all those àçčéñtëd characters in most other European languages? Dedicated keys seem a natural win.

[JBert]

AZERTY is deadly if you want to program software (Lisp excluded, but who programs lisp? *ducks*).

In contrast, Colemak's mix of dead keys on the AltGr layer is pretty nice. It takes some memorization, but you can still make èòìà ąęĉééêôõ without too much trouble or loss of valuable keyboard space.

[Flox]

Well it's not that I can't type with a UK layout for example, but it's just a habit. I've been using this layout since I was a child so I think it would be pretty normal to keep using it.

[TacticalCoder]

@Muirium: well as I wrote: you can configure an ANSI board to use QWERTY and yet use "Alt Gr" ("right alt) as an additional modifier. I do just that and use my right-alt to produce the accentuated characters I need altough I'm on QWERTY. This still leaves lots of "free" key combos to use with Alt Gr: so I use a few of them for shortcuts related to my Window Manager. That way I get best of both world: I can program using QWERTY, I can do all the accentuated characters I need and I have window manager shortcuts which I'm sure won't clash with any apps

@JBert: I do code in Clojure (according to quite a few people, including Clojure's creator, Clojure is a Lisp-1)

@Flox: oops sorry, I stop derailing the thread

[kbdfr]

[…] @Flox: oops sorry, I stop derailing the thread

Let me add my grain of salt

In languages that use them, accentuated letters are not just an occasional add-on, but characters in their own right.

Banning them from the keyboard's first level to have to type them as a combo is not a good idea when one considers that some of them have a much higher frequency than many non-accentuated letters. This is the case in French (see wikipedia), where é is needed more frequently than even f, b or g, à more frequently than x or w, and even ç more frequently than k. That's the reason why on the French keyboard accentuated letters are lower-case on the number row: you need them on a permanent basis.

Having to press two keys to obtain them would very susbstantially taper the typing speed.

[Muirium]

I like French and Belgian ISO's choice to put letters and symbols on the prime spots of the number row. This would make a lot of sense in English too! Brackets and punctuation marks come up more often for me than the numerals themselves, and isn't that exactly what all those numpads out there are for?

Cedillas, umlauts, circumflexes, graves and accutes are very rare indeed in English (we coöpted their façade of elegance to conceal our naïveté) yet they're easy enough to type on the Mac and iOS layouts I'm used to (via Alt and a few dead keys or just holding down the bare letter now). But even anglocentric Apple makes ISO layouts the defaults for everyone who needs them for more than a little stylistic élan. What is decoration for us is actual meaning in other languages.

[TacticalCoder]

I like French and Belgian ISO's choice to put letters and symbols on the prime spots of the number row.

Of course as kbdfr wrote: some characters are very often used in, say, french. That said I'm a native french speaker yet I spent most of my time programming (and writing comments and docs in english), writing in english (even often when emailing other native french speakers), on english forums, etc.

For example I don't think I'm using '&' more often than '1' and I'm certainly not using '§' more often than '6' and seen that I'm more often writing in english than in french, french AZERTY hardly makes any sense to me. For the time when I need 'é' and 'è' etc. I can input them using AltGr.

I also do not think that two keys are necessarily always slower than one: Ctrl+h (caps-lock+h if you wish) is IMHO faster than having to reach for backspace.

I take it that for people really into that, you could record all the characters you input over a period of weeks and then create a layout based on the character frequencies (for example if you're a french programmer writing in Lisp, the characters you use the most are going to be different than the ones you use if you're a flemish Ruby programmer). At that point you probably also want to use a real ergonomic keyboard (split and symmetric)...

I decided to stay with something simple: QWERTY with a tiny twist to be able to input the french characters.

YMMV

[kbdfr]

Looks like most DT members are programmers

But as it is, most of the French-speaking keyboard users will actually type French and will of course need the full range of the French alphabet.

I also do not think that two keys are necessarily always slower than one: Ctrl+h (caps-lock+h if you wish) is IMHO faster than having to reach for backspace.

I disagree
Hitting my (1u!) backspace key is just a move of my right pinky while my left hand remains in its position, so I don't have to move it back like would be the case with a combo. And that's for two keys being pressed at the same time. When you have to hit two keys successively (like, say, ´ and then e to type a Frenche é on a German keyboard), of course you need more time than for a single keypress.

[Muirium]

[
I take it that for people really into that, you could record all the characters you input over a period of weeks and then create a layout based on the character frequencies (for example if you're a french programmer writing in Lisp, the characters you use the most are going to be different than the ones you use if you're a flemish Ruby programmer). At that point you probably also want to use a real ergonomic keyboard (split and symmetric)...

It's been done.

What you with with non-mainstream layouts, you pay with the pain of trying to accomodate QWERTY after your investment. I've not tried it myself, but there's definitely some sound ideas behind this stuff. Well, maybe not Dvorak… <duck>

[Vierax]

I'm on the other side of the frontier (near Roubaix in North of France)
If you are French spoken instead of Vlaams (or even German) you can try the bépo layout : it's basically a Dvorak optimised for French language(s). It allows a lot of diacritics for the other EU language (almost every latin language including Vietnamese or Esperanto) monotonic Greek and a lot of money symbols with a system of dead keys. It's free and open source so you can easily mod it as you wish : some users made their own variant since a while. I'm not a programmer, only wiki syntax and bash scripting, but bépo is very helpful for signs like () [] <>\ / {} and typographic as «» … —
It's a typist layout, easy to learn with a lot of tools and exercises.
If you're interested, 7bit sells the full alpha set for a good price in the Round5 thread.