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A symmetric stagger, ergo design

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Gorbon:
I've been having an itch lately for a new ergo design, so I thought why not give it a try.

I took the following ingredients:

* The number of keys from a TKL (87)
* An inexpensive and easy to find extended keycap set (e.g. enjoyPBT 117 key set)
* A comfortable home-row hand placement with:

* arms angled and floating
* straight wrists
* palms slightly rotated to face each other
* fingers curled and relaxed
I tried to bring all the above together by placing the keys in comfortable positions, while keeping the keyboard as compact as possible (lengthwise at least). This is what I came up with (don't pay too much attention to the Mac layout and the layers):



* Fully symmetric design that allows for better use of the thumbs and doesn't overload the right pinkie (brackets, braces, etc, are under a thumb activated layer)
* A width of 16u (a right-hand mouse would be 8u away from the center, whereas in a 60% it's 8.25u away, due to its asymmetry)
* A curved home-row (a,s,d,v - m,k,l,;,) seems optimal here. Perhaps a non-qwerty layout might suit it better (Colemak?)
* There is room for a 0.91" OLED display near the top (the ghosted key there)
* The "tab" and "return" keys at the arrow cluster, are rotated 1.25u bottom row keys (not sure if this is a good idea, otherwise they would be replaced by 1u keys)
* There's 2.25u of separation between the two halves
* Needs 5 extra keycaps over a 104-key set (4 x 1.5u bottom-row and 1 x 1.75u home-row). It should be easy to find these in an extended set
* No need for stabilizers (yay!)
* All the legends wouldn't be correct (unless you go for blank keys), but at least the key profiles would beSo what do you think? Should I go ahead and build this thing? Is there anything obvious I'm missing?

Thanks for reading.

PS: I think I'm gonna call it Syster87 (Symmetric Stagger Ergo, 87 keys). Keyboards need fancy names these days.

nevin:
very interesting. very few 14 column+ ergos out there.
couple suggestions....
- in the programming, slide the numpad over to the left one column
- offer a variant without dedicated F-keys
- i'd take (3) 1u rorated thumb keys over a 1u & a 1.5u (i like to chord modifiers, putting shift in between ctl & alt (or cmd & opt on mac) so you can easily hold two keys with one thumb
- the next version, you could do a truly split version

Gorbon:
Hi nevin and thank you for the feedback.


--- Quote from: nevin on Mon, 22 February 2021, 07:05:42 ---- in the programming, slide the numpad over to the left one column

--- End quote ---
Yes, I had it like that initially, but it's harder to hit "0" with a thumb that way, so I moved it to the right.


--- Quote from: nevin on Mon, 22 February 2021, 07:05:42 ---- offer a variant without dedicated F-keys

--- End quote ---
Yeah sure; I'd have to get around building this one first though.


--- Quote from: nevin on Mon, 22 February 2021, 07:05:42 ---- i'd take (3) 1u rorated thumb keys over a 1u & a 1.5u (i like to chord modifiers, putting shift in between ctl & alt (or cmd & opt on mac) so you can easily hold two keys with one thumb

--- End quote ---
I've been going back and forth about the thumb keys. My thumbs fall right in the center of those 1.5u keys and to fit 3 keys, I'd either have to remove the arrow cluster or move everything to the outside, which isn't ideal. Also, I've found that a 1u key for space is too small for my thumbs to hit accurately.


--- Quote from: nevin on Mon, 22 February 2021, 07:05:42 ---- the next version, you could do a truly split version

--- End quote ---
There are so many well designed split keyboards out there that I don't think I could come up with anything better. I'd like to think that in this design, the increased hand angle that the row and column staggering allow, combined with the 2.25u hand separation, offer some of the benefits of a split keyboard in a one-piece unit.

jamster:
Just throwing this out there- you can pretty much prototype this, and a whole load of different layouts, with a couple of Dumang DK6 boards placed next to each other (if you wanted a single board instead of a split). Though the up/down arrows and F7 would have to be slightly off to either side.

Gorbon:

--- Quote from: jamster on Mon, 22 February 2021, 09:54:15 ---Just throwing this out there- you can pretty much prototype this, and a whole load of different layouts, with a couple of Dumang DK6 boards placed next to each other (if you wanted a single board instead of a split). Though the up/down arrows and F7 would have to be slightly off to either side.

--- End quote ---
Yes, I've seen that and it's a great idea and implementation, but availability, pricing, shipping/importing can be problematic, especially in my corner of the world.

But in order to prototype a design you don't really need to get too fancy. You can export the image from KLE, print it in 100% scale, glue it on a foam board, stick the switches on it and type away. I would encourage anyone even a little interested in ergonomics or/and keyboard design to give it try. Float your arms in front of you in a comfortable position, keep your wrists straight and fingers relaxed and track the natural movement of your fingers onto a board. You'd be surprised at what you'd be able to discover and figure out how even popular "ergo" boards (there's one that slips my mind right now, starting with "AL" and ending with "ICE") are actually pretty poor designs. You could try the same on a small one-piece ortholinear keyboard and you'd probably arrive at similar conclusions.

Also, high-speed video recording seems to be a common feature now on phones. You can point the camera on a specific area of the keyboard, type for a little while and watch in slow motion how you press the keys. This is why I added the gaps to the keys pressed by the ring and pinkie fingers. I noticed that I was consistently pressing those keys way off-center.

Finally, to go a bit on a tangent, some years ago when I started learning about keyboard design, I always assumed that row staggering is bad and ortholinear is good, but that's not universally true of every design. If you don't want to rotate the two halves (split angle) you can, symmetrically, row stagger the keys and that should get you part (most?) of the way there.

For instance on a standard keyboard, the row staggering on the right side helps align your hand with the keys, but of course it does the opposite on the left side. You need to twist your left hand unnaturally outwards in order to hit the reverse staggered top row and this is why touch typing lessons teach pressing "c" with the middle finger instead of the index. This is also why stepped caps-lock keys were introduced. With a twisted wrist, an overextended pinkie fans out further to left, causing mistypes. A stepped caps-lock is really a band-aid solution to serious design flaw.

My inspiration for this design were the Esrille, the NEC PC-9801 and the NEC Ergofit and only when I started testing their design choices, I appreciated and understood their elegance.

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