Hi all!
I currently use a Das Keyboard with brown switches, and I love it. For years, in my ignorance, I stuck to cheap dell $20 keyboards I got through work since nothing at best buy still had the standard 104-key layout that I grew up with--or 101, ha. However, when one of them failed on me during an otherwise really exciting game of starcraft with some buddies of mine, I decided it was time to look for something better. I soon found the Steelseries 6gv2, but quickly discovered that I ABSOLUTELY HATED the tall enter key, small right shift, and the displaced \ key layout that's more common across the pond in europe. Finally I found Das Keyboard and realized a standard layout with nice switches. Sweet!
Sadly I overestimated my touch-typing ability, and got the "Ultimate" which has no labels on the keys. I thought it would help me to solidify my weakpoints (as if I had any, hah!) but instead it seems to have drastically worsened them. I know now that my use of the number row is awful, and my left hand bottom row (specifically CVB) is abysmal. Plus, since I program for work, I learned that it would be nice to have labels for my bracket/brace keys too, since I frequently miss. In short, I decided that label-less keys were a bad fit for me. I figured I could just buy the printed keycap set from Das Keyboard...but they don't do this. Wtf Das Keyboard?
I resigned myself to living with it (since buying an entire second keyboard seemed totally wasteful) until recently when trying to learn an alternate key layout (again for starcraft) that used the right hand on the left side of the keyboard for easy access to Shift/Ctrl with the thumb (I'm a lefty). As I tried to learn this new control scheme, together with new hand placement, I quickly grew frustrated with my unlabeled keycaps and started searching again. This time, I found an article on teamliquid.net that mentioned geekhack, and here I am! I've browsed around, and I'm sure that I can replace my keycaps without too much hassle...but why stop there?
Now, I do love my das keyboard, but ultimately it suffers all the problems that any standard 104 does--that being the encumbrance of qwerty history. I think I really dislike that the keys aren't in columns; the spacebar is absurdly big considering that I only press one centimeter of it; ctrl and shift require me to wrench my hands to the side which has caused me some slight RSI pains during crunch times at work; my right hand has claimed B and split keyboards argue with me; things of this nature. I've read about keyboards that solve one or two of these problems, such as the kinesis advantage for columns and the happy hacking keyboard for ctrl placement.
So here's where the dream part comes in--to be honest, I've always wanted to try my hand at design, and reading through a little bit of geekhack's forums makes me think that this might not be as impossible as I always thought. Say I wanted to design a simple mechanical keyboard, with four rows of 14 keys arranged in columns, and with the spacebar row filled with ctrl/alt-sized keys or something. Is this something I could do/build myself? If I were to go through one of these "small run" shops, how do I specify my requirements?
In summary, if I wanted to pursue this columnar-key layout thing, would it be feasible to design my own or am I better off just trying a kinesis?
Also, happy to have found this awesome corner of the internet.
