And surprisingly it’s going pretty well. I’m late to the fad I think, but only a few weeks ago I thought it was bananas to not have arrow keys. Then I learned about the whole tiny-keyboard world, and decided to go for it.

The keyboard I’m using is a Ferris Sweep, which as free and open hardware you may produce yourself.

At the moment I have 9 layers, 7 of them in frequent use. The learning process has been surprisingly not bad. And using QMK I have tweaked the key map a lot already.

If you use a computer a lot, say for your job, it’s worth optimizing how you interact with it.

  • peeonyou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    Keyboards like these are why I had to carry my own keyboard around when I worked in IT support for a techie company. Once we had to do BIOS updates for each and every desktop machine and at least 50% of them had weird ass keyboards that only the person who owned it knew how to use.

    That said I don’t have the time nor energy to relearn how to type.

    • tim_curry [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      7 days ago

      Lmao I have a colleague who brings in like a new flavour of keyboard in every month that somehow has even less keys than the last one and when he asks for my help he’s like “oh sorry i bound the windows key to my buttplug” as a struggle to write literally anything. Nobody can psyop me down from a full size keyboard with numpad. Anyway bringing your own keeb is good from a hygiene standpoint aint catching ur keyboard boogers.

      Also I don’t trust the clean desk aesthetic if ur desk isnt a mess of post-it notes, random PC parts, a bunch of pens and notebooks and 3 missmatched monitors I don’t trust you

        • tim_curry [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 days ago

          I’m using a mountain Everest keeb atm nice for being able to switch the numpad to different sides. I also made the little screen attachment permanently show this stfu-terf

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        I really need to clean my keyboard… It’s a full-sized Keychron I got on sale for $20. Desk is full of diagrams of different networks and algorithms on legal pads.

        Need to use a mouse for drafting stuff, and most of those programs also heavily use key bindings so I’m never getting rid of my full sized.

    • FedPosterman5000 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      7 days ago

      I’ve never had the follow-through to do this, but think it would be funny to have a series of increasingly esoteric keyboards each time IT comes. Eventually have something like this - yeah it’s mechanical