My many attempts at creating a more optimal keyboard layout for my self. So far all of the layouts have been used on a normal TKL keyboard, but with the latest layouts the goal has been to create a layout that would work on a Charybdis by Bastard Keyboards. See the cover picture for how the keys have been moved around to make the latest layout work on a normal keyboard.
UPDATE: v5.0 and later are made for a custom keyboard generated with the beta Cosmos keyboard configurator by rianadon. See a separate post here about this keyboard.
The layouts have been configured using KMonad which allows you to rebind all keys on almost any keyboard and add extra functionalities such as multiple layers and tap-hold buttions. My current layout is configured with KMonad through my NixOS configuration and can be seen here.
Below follows some of the different layouts I have tried and some thoughts about them. They are ordered with the most recent version at the top so to get the complete picture maybe start from the bottom.
v5.0
Change of plans, I have created a new keyboard design replacing my previous plans. This new design has a few more keys than the previous and replaces the trackball with a trackpad. The overall layout stays largely the same as before with some modification to the thumb clusters and shifting of some characters like the various brackets. I also moved ctrl and alt to the pinky instead of the thumbs. For more details about the keyboard see this post.
v4.6
A slight modification to the thumb clusters, but otherwise the same as v4.5. Having return and the nav layer key as tap-hold on the same key created accidental return presses sometimes and having all the modifier keys on the same side was suboptimal when needing multiple of them at the same time.
v4.5
My current layout with three layers:
- A normal layer with letters, numbers, etc.
- A shift layer with capital letters, symbols, etc.
- A third layer (called nav in the image) with arrow keys, media keys, symbols, F keys, etc.
The modifier keys have been placed on the thumb keys and the symbols on the number keys closely resembles a normal US layout with some modification.
The upper left on each key is the normal layer, upper right is the shift layer, lower right is the third layer and lower left is if the key is held down. The keys M1, M2 and M3 are the mouse keys (left click, right click and middle click).
v4.2
A slightly better thumb key layout but I tried something new with the symbols on the number keys which I didn’t like.
v4.1
A more complete layout for the Charybdis. The main issue with this one is that I found that there are too many functions on the thumb keys and the numbers maybe don’t need to be in two places.
v4.0
This is where I had found the Charybdis keyboard and got interested in maybe building one at some point. I am not going to make many comments about this layout since it is just a first draft that I didn’t use for long.
I had an idea to place all brackets with opening and closing mirrored on the two halves inspired by The Primeagen, but ended up not liking that.
v3.2
Here I switched to using the Miryoku KMonad layout with some modifications such as adding the keys å, ä and ö. I used this layout for multiple months and liked it, it would work very well for a keyboard like the 5 column Corne keyboard.
The reason that I switched from this layout is that I felt like I needed a few more keys because for example the letters ä and å are placed in a suboptimal position which gets annoying when typing in swedish. I also ended up deciding that I don’t want homerow mods because I end up with misclicks sometimes.
By this point I where really sold on the idea of thumb keys so moving some modifier keys to the thumbs could be a good idea and maybe reducing the number of layers if I have more keys available.
v3.0
A half complete layout inspired by the Miryoku layout and the Miryoku KMonad project.
v2.0
Some further improvements by trying some different placements of the backspace, return, tab and escape keys. Also quite a few changes to the numbers and symbols layers.
v1.4
This layout solves the issue with the modifier keys by using homerow mods, a good idea that I used for a long time but didn’t end up liking in the end. This layout also adds another layer with the arrow keys for example and I started trying the colemak-dh layout for the letters.
v1.0
This was the first layout I created by moving most of the symbols and numbers to a separate layer under the letters, this layer was accessed by holding the spacebar. The main issue with this was that keys such as backspace and escape are still difficult to reach and the modifier keys requires a lot of movement of the pinky finger.