I've wanted to build a keyboard from scratch for some time now, and I figured that instead of simply buying the parts for a 60%, why not put all those ideas floating inside my head into a new design? Who knows if it might turn out to not be total garbage?
Here we go!Basic design directives:
- The physical layout starts off the well-known "enhanced keyboard" layout and shuffles some things around; the alphanumeric block is not to be touched, except the bottom row, as modifiers will be changed a bit.
- The Esc and function keys block stays the same (although its separation from the main block is reduced from 1U to 0.5U).
- The nav cluster is moved wholesale to the left of the alphanumeric block. The general idea is to have the user navigate with his left hand (not that different from the current usage of WASD as cursor keys) and use the right one for numeric data entry and things like that.
- Redo the modifier keys so there are two of each (Shift, Control, Alt, and AltGr/Meta) on each side of the keyboard. I would have preferred to set them in a symmetrical manner, but the desirability of having the Ctrl key back on its traditional/Unix placement and the emergence of the Windows keys (Win/menu) made this impossible to attain.
- The lock lights should be placed right next to the respective keys (Caps Lock and Scroll Lock).
- The Caps Lock key is moved off to a more proper place.
- The numpad is replaced by the multipad.
What is the multipad?
At first I thought I'd simply remove the nav layer from the numpad, as it's redundant. Do that, get rid of the Num Lock key and... why not put the now vacant layer to better use and assign other characters? Back in the day, I would have killed to have a hexadecimal numpad, so why not put an hexpad where the nav layer was? Nowadays, on the other hand, I use several typographical symbols and diacritics that aren't really assigned to any regular layout, so why not go with that instead? In the end, I decided that the best course is to have a numpad with four layers, to be cycled through with a single, dedicated key; the keyboard would sport four color-coded lights above the numpad to indicate which layer is active.
I have my own ideas of the sets of characters for each layer in the multipad, and undoubtedly other people will have their own. Since keyboard programming is now easy, this could be customized to the user's satisfaction, and the only real issue would be to get printed keycaps to match whatever the user has programmed.
The multipad is a simple 5x4 grid of 20 keys (not counting other four keys above it, at 0.5U). I never understood why the zero key should have been a double wide one and the plus one a double tall, even more so if that meant leaving off the comma and some other deserving character, so both were replaced by two 1U keys each. The numpad Enter key got the same treatment (as I feel it's unnecessary, given that the main Enter key is right next to the multipad), but could be reintroduced if need be.
With all this in mind, I got to work on the Keyboard Layout Editor, and this is what I've come up with:
- model_N_d2.png (73.79 KiB) Viewed 3264 times
I'm still not entirely happy with the way I've set up the modifiers. Perhaps I could shuffle them about a bit, reduce the Win/Menu keys to 1U and set them up like this:
- model_N_d2_alternate_mods.png (5.98 KiB) Viewed 3264 times
What do you guys think? Your opinions will be welcome.
