Great posts and research! I am planning to build one of jacobolus' ideas, namely this one:
. But with some modifications, of course. Two changes were suggested to me by Xah Lee:
- remove the Esc and Backspace and put them in an extra column in the middle (= more hand separation within the same 60% border).
- Remove the lower corner 1 3 7 9 and arrow. Make them into a row instead, flush with the thumb keys row. I'm not sure about this....
For my build I will definitely use your ideas on key profiles!
What I want is a portable keyboard. Influenced by jacobolus'concepts and Oobly's builds... If that is alright with you guys!
This means:
- small (60% size)
- one-piece, for simplicity
- flattish..... completely flat, or some tenting and the thumb keys on a lower plane... I won't go as far as Oobly, I want it to be flattish... But some tenting and level difference may be beneficial already.
- thumb keys: I'm torn between the Oobly's idea and the Esrille thumb keys....
I will use my own layout of course, which I calculated with Michael D1cken's mtgap software (I can't spell his name correctly due to forum software!) , using a corpus that represents my workflow (85% dutch prose, 10% english prose, the rest other languages, and just a wee bit of coding web stuff). It performs (for my use) better than other known layouts and it looks like this:
. u o p y x c l b v
a i e n h m d r t s
: , ? k q f g w j z
Anyway.... sorry for derailing, I may use Oobly's setup, "flatten" that and put it on a 60% groundplate. Suppose I did,
- what key rows/profiles would be best for the hands, and which for the thumbs?
- if I put it on 60% groundplate, what would you put in the middle? I'd love some dedicated keys for much used functions, such as ctrl-a, ctrl-x, ctrl-v, ctrl-z, ctrl-z etc...
- Question for Oobly: I suppose you have to keep thumb keys pushed down, for the layers to work. Suppose you have to inputs lots of numbers, doesn't that get old? Or do you have a sort of "capslock" function... (omg what did I say
) you know, press once for the layer to activate, press again to get back to the normal layer...
Finally: for a 3 row setups (like Oobly's), would this work (I'm using qwerty row names now, for simplicity):
DCS row5 for the Q row
DCS row 2 or row 3 for the A row (=home row),
DCS row 4 for the Z row
Or would the steps be too big?
Hope all this is sufficiently on topic!