My most recent mechanical keyboard layout.
It doesn’t look like I have made any posts about mechanical keyboards before, which is a surprise to me. I’ve been in a hobbyist mechanical keyboard user for a while. As many do, I started with larger keyboards and have gotten progressively smaller.
After a my first short experiment building a fully custom board, I started with the 65% size. This worked pretty well, but when I realized that I didn’t need the arrow keys, I moved to the happy hacker keyboard layout. Instead, I got used to having the arrows under my fingers on FEDS and JIKL on a layer. From there, I went to the BMEK, which was essentially a hhkb as well, just with an ergo flair. Very recently, I’d been exploring making better use of the symbol layers, and wondering if I could get by and thrive without even the number row and extra keys on the right between the letters and modifiers.
So I settled on picking up a secondhand Prime_E inside the Prime_Elise aluminum case. It’s a 40% syle board, but still with the ergo flair like the BMEK.
I think this keyboard is great. Just all the keys I need, everything is very close at hand. It has two spacebars, so I can use one of them to trigger the main navigation macro layer. I hold caps lock key to activate the symbols, and a key in the bottom right corner to type the numbers on the left hand home row. I really like having backspace, enter, and delete with reach without moving my palm.
Here’s my full keyboard layout, with code on github, from KLE.
