Dude, congrats on making an amazing layout. Better than the typematrix layout IMHO.
definitely a nice layout Why not angle it out, even just a little, or make it hinged, a la the Goldtouch?
Thanks, glad y'all appreciate it. Even if I wanted to add a hinge/pivot or angled split here, it'd be tricky to split this layout without losing some key (heh) aspects of its current functional elegance, and of course that would also make the board wider; besides, this thread is about creating simple mounting plates to prototype/hand-wire new board designs, and adding hinges and odd angles may exceed, and certainly complicate, that purview. Besides, we already have the ErgoDox for those wanting major hand separation and custom angling potential; this is just a different approach.
The starting idea here was to make a layout which separated the hands widely enough that an angled split would be unnecessary, since that sort of thing is necessitated by having the forearms converge from shoulder width to meet a narrow keyboard with little or no separation between right- and left-hand keys. By pushing the alphanum keys to the outer edges of a Tipro 128-key (16x8) matrix to create the desired hand separation and minimize pinky-stressful key placements, I realized that left just enough room for thumb-shift keys, cursor nav, and a numpad in the middle; with those elements in place, the rest of the layout was just sorting out details for lesser-used key placements. Originally, I'd designed a layout making full use of the 128-key matrix (the layout shown here is a row short), with the extra 16 keys being assigned to shifted-numrow symbols (!@#$%^&*) and a full set of brackets ({[<>]}), but I'm actually more pleased with how this 112-key layout turned out.
The early TypeMatrix model 2020 had a similar concept, but IMO had inadequate separation between the hands and an otherwise muddled implementation with some odd key placements, layer-based numpad (which I've never liked in practice), and continued use of pinky-stressful keys in traditional positions. Their current model 2030 only exacerbates those concerns, separating the halves by only one column, along with other new quirks I don't care for.