jacobolus wrote: Nice work, looks great!
Have any of the fans of standard-ish matrix layout keyboards put up a review after typing on one for a few months about how they liked it compared to a standard keyboard? It’s always seemed to me like the actual finger motions required are as bad (or slightly worse even) than a standard Sholes stagger layout, from a speed/accuracy/comfort perspective.... with of course the additional disadvantage of being non-standard and requiring a fairly steep learning curve. The Typematrix and similar keyboards have extra columns in the middle as one selling point, expanding the distance between hands and giving the index fingers some extra keys to press, but layouts like this one or the Planck don’t. With the inclusion of some 2u keys, this also doesn’t avoid the need for stabilizers, like some new keyboards I’ve seen.
What are the goals of the layout? Is it mostly an aesthetic thing, or maybe there’s some advantage to a pure matrix layout for video game shortcuts or something? Isn’t it uncomfortable to have the right shift so far away? What fingering do you use for the various keys?
Hope I don’t sound too negative. I’m quite genuinely curious what the attraction is of these layouts.
I think it's a very reasonable question. First, let me note that I don't think the staggered keyboard is much more than standardized convention, much like qwerty.
I've been typing on matrix for a couple months now (planck, atomic, and now this board). It's six of one, half dozen of the other as far as I'm concerned. The key layout is much less of an impact that, say, switch selection in my experience. I find the key positioning to be not much different than changing to a keyboard with a slightly different key pitch.
So basically, matrix is neither an advantage or disadvantage for me. When I occasionally am typing on a staggered keyboard it doesn't prove to be much of a problem or difference.
The matrix layout was a convenient design constraint for my first from scratch keyboard. My next from scratch plate is staggered. I care much more about the the thumb keys and symmetry than matrix/non-matrix.
Hope that clarifies some. I don't see any mystery or magic about matrix. It's just a slightly different pitch to me.
Invaluable resources.
