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Fairly long post ahead, but I hope this'll make a few things clearer, as well as give some insight on why I made the exact suggestions that I did. To be clear, I still stand behind them 100%.
Re: hiraganaI'm not sure if the tooling for that key exists as of right now. GMK's catalogue isn't public, either. If the tooling doesn't exist, the cost of making it will be factored into both the kit's MOQ and ultimately the cost of the kit for buyers.
The tooling in question does exist (otherwise I wouldn't be suggesting it). The mold was introduced in
GMK Mecha-01, which ran in July. Some other sets that use it are:
GMK Devoted (scheduled to run in February),
GMK Mashu (scheduled to run in April),
GMK Retrowave.
Along with
`~ー, Mecha-01 also introduced the
半/全 mold. The primary reason for the addition of these two keys was providing minimal JIS layout support in sets with Japanese sublegends. Having one key without the other undermines this, hence my suggestion to include the tilde as well in Wise Wolf's hiragana kit. The other reason for having
`~ー in the kit is that it lets you avoid having a duplicate
ろ sublegend (on
these keys) if you decide to use the hiragana keys in an ISO configuration. You can find more about these setups in
this summary.
It's worth noting that
GMK βeta had the half-width/full-width toggle key, but didn't have the tilde with chōonpu in its base kit. Hiney decided not to include the tilde in the end because the kit was already very large, and the extra keys would only benefit a small demographic (ISO / basic JIS). However, the
半角/全角 key was kept because the whole kit was thematically based around JustSystems HiPro caps, in which the red width toggle key plays a prominent visual role. So in that sense, this key was more like a novelty in βeta. However, in general, the two keys should not be included one without the other.
Kit bloat such as adding spacebars to hiragana kits, on top of tab, on top of ISO support (since GMK JIS tooling is in its infancy), is how we get to $70+ Hiragana alphas kits. From what I've seen, mixing keysets is a pretty uncommon practice.
Sure, I agree. But if avoiding kit bloat was the goal, why was the
半角/全角 key added? It has no function or utility by itself, so it's a key that directly bloats the kit. Perhaps its intended purpose was to be a Japanese-looking novelty key without offering actual utility, like in βeta, but that doesn't make sense in this set.
If the goal is to avoid bloat in the hiragana kit, the R1
半角/全角 and R4
<>ろ keys should be removed — the kit works for ANSI and ISO just as well without them. You can go a step further and also remove mod-colored tilde and pipe. Go a step beyond that and you can also remove the extra B and homing keys (though that's probably pushing it too far).
The point I was trying to make with the spacebars remark (which you misinterpreted as my main suggestion; although that's partly my fault for not phrasing it better) is as follows:
If you're already making the kit large by adding these extra keys (primarily the half-width/full-width toggle one), you might as well go all the way and:
1) add
`~ー such that the addition of the toggle key at least makes functional/practical sense; and
2) add spacebars, which are about equally as useful as the aforementioned keys — which, as you describe, is not very.
Otherwise, those extra keys shouldn't be included in the kit either. In fact, at this point I think you should just remove
半角/全角 and call it a day.
By the way, I just noticed that the R3
\|む key in the hiragana kit is missing its
¥ sublegend in the top-right corner.
@Nutty, you should probably fix that.
Re: extra spacekeysOn the other hand, removing the additional 1c and 1.75c spacebars from a kit designed to affordably extend compatibility to less common layouts, when it will not appreciably affect the cost of the kit to do so, is asinine.
The kit is small in comparison to many spacebar kits, contains a single color of spacebar, and does not include doubleshot keys. It won't be expensive. It's better to have that extra compatibility in this case, especially when you consider price.
As far as I'm aware,
all layouts which use 1.75c and 2× 1c spaces are 40% layouts. Let's be specific here: 1.75c is used by Vortex Core, JD40, JD45, Prime_L; and 2× 1c is used by various 40% ortho boards. Those layouts all require the 40% kit,
which already includes 2× 1c and 1.75c (as well as a second R4 1.75u key in the form of
Lock). Therefore, including these keys in spacebars is quite unnecessary.
If you are aware of any 60% or larger boards that use these keys, please let me know. In that case, keeping these keys might be worth considering if the use case is common enough (though at that point I think I would have heard about it). Otherwise, the keys are dead weight and can be removed without significantly sacrificing compatibility for anyone.
For this exact reason, if you take a look at spacebars kits that ran over the past year, you'll notice that fewer and fewer of them included those keys as time went on. We're currently at the point where almost no new sets do it (1/13 of currently running sets have them; 0/10 if you consider just GMK). This is good, because it shows that over time kits have gotten more optimized. However, that's not to say that 1.75c can't become a thing again in the future if a board that uses it becomes really popular (we're kind of seeing that happen with 1.5u Shift now). But for now, it's best to avoid it because there simple isn't enough boards/demand for it.
By the way, even if you consider boards such as JD40/JD45 (which use 2× 1.75c bars but are very uncommon nowadays) and ortho setups with 4× 1c (also vanishingly rare), where extra 1.75c and 1c spaces
could actually come in handy, your “affordably extend compatibility” argument still doesn't make sense — there is nothing affordable about needing to buy base + 40% + spacebars to cover your board. And, indeed, if you ask around among 40% users (which I have), almost no one does this.
As far as 40s are concerned, I'm not an expert but I referred Nutty to someone who I trust in the 40s community for kitting advice, and the 1.25c space stayed. Min/maxing a kit like 40s seems like a good idea, but it's definitely something that would be better polled with a larger sample of 40s users.
1.25c is not a thing in 40s, though, as anybody in the 40% community with an active interest in kitting will be able to tell you. To quote one 40s user: “1.25u space is pretty much relegated to an optionally smaller bar on boards which use a 1.5u space. Such as on Corne.” However, in those cases, you actually need two 1.25c keys, not one; and these layouts are pretty rare to boot, so these two keys are not worth including most of the time (especially so in a GMK kit).
I suspect that the idea behind keeping 1.25c in the kit was to allow for coverage of Alice and split 6.25u layouts with the 40% kit. This is common practice in sets that include alpha-colored spacekeys in the 40% kit, and accent-colored spacekeys in the spacebars kit (in those cases, the 40s kit is often dubbed “Extensions”). However, given the fact that in Wise Wolf spacekeys in both kits are alpha-colored; and the fact that the spacebars kit is, as you said, small and cheap; there is no incentive for Alice or split 6.25u users to buy the 40% kit over the spacebars kit to get the keys they need. Therefore, there is no reason to include 1.25c in 40s either.
