Made some design updates based on feedback I received from a couple fellow keyboard designers and I just received the first two prototypes this week. Super happy with how they turned out.
No numbers, important keys shoved out of reach… OP expects you to bind OTHER IMPORTANT KEYS LIKE ESC/TAB/SHIFT TO BE BOUND TO Q in order to function…
Might as well just grab a macropad at this point. You’ll almost never use the keys for one thing anyways and you’ll be doing Ctrl+/Fn+ combos constantly(except you don’t even have those buttons, so what are you making combos out of anyways?).
I wouldn’t even use this for an emulator. WASD is completely borked and the buttons you’d bind them to instead would then be lost as well and those need to be rebound too. A controller is more useful than this ever would be.
How would you even type a “?” with that keyboard. No, I would not use a keyboard that was missing all numbers, 90% of symbols and threw 3 of the keys haphazardly to the side.
This is a joke at best and mostly just waste. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It’s junk like this that makes the alternate keyboard community look like a bunch of schizos. “Why would I use something that works when I can remove tons of functionality to be cutesy?”.
Hard pass.
Chords and layers, my guy. Much in the same way you type a capital letter with a combination of two keys (shift + letter), people using smaller keyboards do the same thing for any key you deem “missing”, just with more keys being pressed. There’s even functionality where each key behaves differently depending on whether you tap or hold it.
Technically, you can have only 10 keys (one for each digit on your hands) and still get 2^10 = 1024 unique actions! Forget letters; you can have have whole words encoded in those keys, and voila ~ that’s basically stenography!
If you don’t like it, that’s okay! I’d never be able to use one myself either, but the people who can use it do like it; and besides, it’s all good fun to see what people can do with these layouts.