The Humble Hacker Keyboard

  • I'm shocked. I've never been happy with any keyboard, and so I've been keeping notes for the past couple years with every good keyboard idea I've seen, and by now I've got a pile of sketches at home that look extremely similar to this (matrix layout, control keys between hands, Dvorak, etc.). And someone on hackaday.com said "i’ve done some drawings quite similar, great to see people sharing the same ideas".

    I feel like there's some latent shared understanding that the current keyboard designs are bad, and we all know how to do it right, but people are afraid to change anything now.

    There are 3 or 4 other specific ideas I have which are not implemented in this design yet, but I think it's close enough (and sufficiently better than other keyboards) that if these were for sale, I'd buy a pair of them right now.

  • The arrows between the space keys are an interesting idea, but all those keys between the letters? Yuck.

    Also, it's hard to write code that uses arrays when there aren't any "[" or "]" keys.

  • I like novel keyboards quite a bit.

    However, as someone who spent the last 20 years training the muscle memory for programming in QWERTY and 10 years using Emacs on QWERTY, this is completely unusable to me.