Rats, Oats and Zombies; a minimal keyboard journey
It's been a little while since i wrote anything here. Primarily, this is because I got swept up in the need to hyperfixate on my hobbies amidst the current goings on in the world. I needed an escape, so into my shell I went.
a couple years ago, I decided I wanted to challenge myself and learn one of those "alternate keyboard layouts". I'd been pretty passionate about mechanical keyboards for a while and every now and then I'd see one that was truly... odd. the keys would be in a concave angle, sometimes the whole board was split down the middle! It was enthralling and inspiring to me that there existed a community of people that are so focused on refining something that we take for granted these days.
Soon, I learned about how the "qwerty" layout came to be. there seems to be some debate about why exactly it was invented but usually people seem to agree that the characters were arranged in the order they remain as a means of getting around technical limitations of nineteenth century typewriters. In passing, I had heard of the "Dvorak" layout, which was invented around a century ago in an effort to get around the ergonomic shortcomings of qwerty, maybe its my bias towards the name sounding boring but it never really sparked my interest beyond acknowledging that there did exist at least one alternative way to put letters on a page.
Around the time that I learn about these new layouts, I had recently damaged my current keyboard by spilling soda on it. Lacking any knowledge of soldering, i attempted to clean out the parts that the syrup found its way in to. It was to very little avail and it was time to go back to an old keyboard until i could afford a new one. During this time using my old 'Vortex Core' ...
(a 40 percent keyboard, meaning that it only includes the letters and some modifiers. Imagine chopping off all of the keyboard outside of that leftmost alphabetical cluster, including the number row. You'd then be left with a 40 percent keyboard.)
... I started looking into this exciting world of ergonomic keyboards. Previously, the extent of my interaction with the idea was that wavy keyboard microsoft makes. I'd used one for a bit but found it to be way too clunky for me to think about using it long term. On the horizon however, lied a dreamland of all sorts of experimental input methods.
I spent hours, days even looking at various forums. Some keyboards were 3D printed, designed and built by the person posting about it and some were kits that you could assemble yourself like an advanced lego set. I still don`t know anything about soldering so the DIY area is out of reach. Thankfully, there are tons of cute little boutiques online that will build and send you one of these practical works of art. after a long search, i settled on the "HotDox V2": a variation of the "Ergodox" (one of the more popular split keyboards) with swappable key switches and two cute little LEDs that show you information like what characters you've recently typed and the current layer you're on. The Ergodox is most known because of the "EZ" variation. the one i went with was a little bit cheaper and lacked a tenting kit ...
(a tenting kit is similar to those little tabs at the back of most keyboards that let you angle the board to face you, however tenting kits focus mostly on tilting each half of the board horizontally to where you are facing so your hands sit at a more natural angle while you are typing)
... even with the lack of a tenting kit, this was very exciting for me. The keys are arranged radically differently than a normal keyboard; instead of the keys being horizontally staggered, they're vertically staggered to match the varying lengths of your fingers. Instead of a space bar, you have a whole cluster of keys for your thumbs to use. Sure it took some getting used to but after a while typing on anything else just felt like a compromise.
It was soon after I received the keyboard that I started realizing the shortcomings of "qwerty". On a regular keyboard, your brain kinda filters this out due to learned muscle memory, however when this layout is applied to a keyboard such as the ergodox or similar options, it's as if the smoke has cleared and you can see how horrible qwerty has been this whole time.
The columnar stagger forces you into more ergonomic typing habits and because of this, it becomes extremely apparent how over used your left hand is. For something that is meant to be ergonomic, the qwerty layout was certainly taking away from the potential comfort of this kind of keyboard. So, after some searching, I discovered "Colemak DH". It is a layout that claims to be much more comfortable than qwerty while also keeping some keys in similar locations as to ease the transition away from qwerty
Part Two
now I had fully committed to learning this new "Colemak DH" layout. before the switch, my typing speed was around 70 words per minute. However after adopting this new layout, I was at like,, 5 wpm. it was a rough start for sure. despite the difficulty, i pushed on, spending over an hour a day doing online typing tests and willing myself not to look down at the keyboard for hints.
Finally, after about two months, I could type at half of my old speed. Not fast, but absolutely usable. Now that I had gotten there, it really stood out how much nicer it was to type like this. My fingers had to move far less than they used to, typing out a simple discord message suddenly felt like playing a melody on a piano.
From here, about two years went by. Gradually, I finally hit my original 70 wpm average and things were great in the world of typing.. But could it be better? I'm really not usually one to min-max things but i thought, how far does this rabbit hole really go? so in I jumped, and down i fell.
Initially, the "Graphite" layout caught my attention. It does a few novel things like moving some of the punctuation to the upper rows of the keys. It was a very good layout but something just didn't feel quite right, at least for me. I looked around some more and discovered a wealth of layouts people had made. Seeing the sheer quantity of them, i thought, maybe I should give this a go myself.
So, a go I gave it. Then a few, then it was all i could think about. I was completely enthralled at the problem. I've never really liked math but here i was, enthralled with a math problem. The difference was that it was tangible. I could feel when the results were better or worse. For example, due to the way english is, certain letters end up next to other ones at greater intervals than other possible combinations. "ie" is something that will be a part of many words but "qz" occur next to eachother with immense rarity. So I started looking at how other people have gotten around this; what layouts of these 26 characters leads to the least occurences of uncomfortable consecutive keypresses? how can I optimize this in a way that feels comfortable and intuitive?
First, I quickly whipped together a layout, called it "froggy" and went to bed feeling rather proud of myself. Rather foolishly as i'd soon find out. By the next morning my mind is racing with new possibilities, the creative side wonders maybe if i put a cute word in the layout it'd be easier to remember? a silly idea but one that i couldn't bring myself to put down. So, I started working on a layout where the first four letters of the left home row say "oats". I have a childlike love for oatmeal so it felt fitting. After maybe a week of playing around with different tools made by people more informed than I am in this community of keyboard layout designers, I did it. I made the "Oats" layout. The accomplishment I felt was extraordinary, It was great.
Well it was great for a while but then it happens. I'm using this layout on my ergodox and I keep running into a small grievance that seems innocent but it was grating at my conscious. It was the letter 'Y'. It was positioned above my right pinky finger. I had failed to take in to account how often that letter is used in the english language. So, back to the drawing board.
For a bit I tried to maintain the "Oats" that was so cutely spelled out by the layout of the keys. I felt this hard to describe sentimentality to the word. However, after some hours of experimenting I had to finally give up that idea. Thankfully, I was able to keep a word in there though. Now it spelled "Rats". Good, easy to remember and all of the letters are common so they'll all be easily reachable. Then with more puzzling, Part of "Zombie" began to be spelled out right above "rats" so the left side of the board now said "zomb" in the top row and "rats" in the middle. Somehow i fit two words while maintaining decent statistical performance. I went with the name "Zombie Rats" for a few days, though after reflection i felt it was silly so I brought it down to just "Rats". I began implementing the layout into my daily routine and i was proud of myself. The other thing to note is that, aside from the silly word being spelled out, I also fit the punctuation in a symmetrical, easy to understand layout. The bottom row of the left hand goes " w - , c v " and on the right hand, " k d . / y ". By placing the comma on the left and the period on the right, it feels as though you are completing your sentences in the way they end up on the page. At last, this journey comes to a close.
Or it would have if not for my adhd addled brain. Something else caught my eye in the keyboard communities I was perusing. 34 and 36 key keyboards seemed fairly popular, and holy shit they're so cute! little split keyboards with blank keycaps, they're just so inviting. One of them, the "Ferris" even has a cute little crab mascot on the pcb! I was in love. So of course, i immediately started brainstorming how would i do everything i need to do on my computer with nearly half of the keys i currently had on my ergodox. At first i wanted to go for the ferris keyboard but after some weeks of researching the various options, i realized that some more recent boards are a little bit more reliable in the hardware department. ...
(the microcontroller on the ferris is a seperate component that needs to be soldered in place, and the two halves are connected by a 3.5mm TRRS cable, which if mishandled, can short the pcb and fry your precious little keeb)
... so, 36 keys would be what I end up using when i get around to obtaining one of those adorable little clicky machines. I started looking at ways of integrating all of the keys on the keyboard into the 36 available keys via layers. You'll probably be familiar with layers if you've ever used a laptop, certain keys like brightness controls or volume controls are usually accessed via first holding down a "Fn" key. I found that several people have come up with their own layouts but to my tastes, something was missing. Several of the options I found had different categories of keys on their own layers (all numbers in one layer, another just for symbols, etc). I see how this could be useful, however i was more interested in using a relatively small number of layers.
So, I fit everything I needed into 3 (and a half) layers. The Base layer, a Secondary Layer with modifiers on the homerow and numbers up above, with the extra miscellaneous symbols that aren't included in the numbers via holding shift. Then a third one for homerow oriented arrow keys and media controls, as well as the F1-12 keys. The last "half" layer is used, at least by me, for mimicking part of a standard qwerty keyboard for those times when i don't want to rebind every control in a video game. I refer to this as a half layer because I intend for it to be flexible and used for whatever the user should wish.
And now, we arrive at the present. Here I am, typing away about typing away. I probably wont edit this so, apologies if this drags at points or sounds fanatical at others; but if you did make it to the end, genuinely, thank you <3.
Here's the layout in all it's beauty:
