deskthority

All of the caps sold thus far at MassDrop for the ErgoDox have been blank keycaps. I, for one, really like homing bumps and rely on them a lot, and I also just don't like the look of blank keycaps. Less important but they make things difficult for other people to use my keyboard.

So, I'd like to propose a labelled ErgoDox GB (at MassDrop). This is trickier than most GBs since everyone is likely to have a different layout. However, there is bound to be a large amount of overlap even with different layouts. For example, QWERTY users will have all of the main QWERTY keys in common, and if we go for DSA caps they can be rearranged nicely for Dvorak and Colemak users as well. And, even if you and I put our Alt keys in different positions, so long as their cap profile is the same we'd both benefit from a GB that includes that.

In discussing this with Jasper from MassDrop, the simplest thing to do that's come up is to make a poll for a few layouts and have people vote as to which one they want used for the keycap GB. However, I think we can do a little better than this. If we can also figure out which are the most common extra keys (those not part of the main 10x4 matrix that includes the 1-0, Q-P, A-; and Z-/ rows), we can include those as well. I don't think writing a script to read a bunch of layout source files would be too difficult and would help us pick which keys to include.

These are my thoughts on this thus far. My preference is for cylindrical DCS, but I'm willing to go with DSA if enough people won't buy a QWERTY DCS one (and we'll thus get a greater discount on DSA). If you're interested, please fill out the poll, and also reply to this thread with a link to your layout on MassDrop's configurator. Also, please indicate any thoughts you might have about this; I'm bound to have missed something as I'm pretty new to group buys, etc.! For example, I bet some of you might still be tweaking your layouts, so it might be worthwhile waiting a while, but keep in mind that we'll only be looking at layer 0---there's going to be *way* too much variation in the higher layers for that to be worth considering for the GB.

For those interested, my current layout, which I haven't tweaked in about a few days (and I use the keyboard a lot!), is here. After trying a few different options (such as putting Ctrl and Alt in the thumb clusters) I got annoyed and decided to make the layout as similar to a standard layout as possible, and anything that can't be made to fit that is put in semi-sensible places (as much as possible).

Please do not label a (potential) commercial sale as a group buy. Thank you. There is no group buy. You go to this commercial site, and buy something. No funds are collected by the group, no distribution by the group, etc. If Jasper wants to sell stuff for profit based on demand, name it as such.

There was the DSA Retro GB, which included options for all keys required for the ErgoDox (alpha set + 1.5 and 2.0 sets). Don't remember all the 1.5 and 2.0 sized keys included, but I think there was enough options for everyone. Not sure how much interest there will be for a MD GB after many people probably sourced their keycaps from the DSA GB. If I understand it correctly there will be more DSA GBs by the Retro organizers as well (I definitely hope so )

Thanks TDub. Unfortunately I missed it (though I did try searching around a bit to see what else people have done, and couldn't see much, so I just made my own thread about it). I suppose looking for enough people who want to get a QWERTY DCS set might be difficult, since so few people actually have ErgoDoxes, but that's why I'd like to at least gauge interest to see if it's feasible :)