I've never felt as close to a keyset as I have with this potential one. How do you want me to support your endeavor?
Wow. Well, Massdrop, as you may know (there was a brief talk about this at KeyCon), is trying to build a bunch of new keyboards, to see if we (we = a handful of us who don’t work for MD but are helping them on design) can iterate quickly and try new and interesting things.
Anyway, the plan is to start with a 60% keyboard, and so they put up a poll about possible 60% keyboard layouts (
https://www.massdrop.com/vote/60-keyboard-layouts) which was dramatically won by the hypothetical “HHKB 3” layout (which doesn’t currently exist in any keyboard). Since part of the point is to prove that it’s possible to make any layout that the community wants to see made, the first keyboard will probably be that layout.
No keycap sets currently target an MX or Matias switch keyboard with a layout like that, so the easy obvious thing is to just sell these keyboards with blank keycaps. But as a more exciting alternative, we wanted to make some nice looking legends. Since there’s just a single design (or blanks), take it or leave it, it should hopefully be possible to print enough of these to hit some reasonable scale to keep per-unit price down. Easy option would be to just do lasered caps, but depending on the price I think dye-subs should also be in the realm of possibility.
No promises yet, since the precise manufacturing costs have to be figured out, and there are some other parts of the keyboard design to finish still (luckily for me that’s someone else’s responsibility). But I’m hoping that dye-sub caps with this design (or something equally cool; still open to suggestions) will be available for a small 60%-ish keyboard with either MX or Matias switches, and fully programmable firmware. Fingers crossed.