ergoslab VS kicad-kbplacer

ErgoSlab

My current keyboard has a lot of thumb keys and I use them a lot. I'm getting a bit of RSI from time to time from pushing my thumbs sideways. This means I want future keyboards to activate all the keys using the natural motion of the hand. I've never tried the "lift up" idea, but I hope doing that a lot doesn't cause any injuries 😬.

Yup! That's ESC on tap and a bracket/Fn layer when held. The bracket thing was inspired by tomsaleeba/ergoslab and is still taking some getting used to.

I'm on a 40% too. I was originally on an ErgoDox and thought I couldn't possibly live with any fewer keys, but with more thumb keys and QMK combos I feel quite happy with the 40%. One of the key requirements I had when I designed the ErgoSlab was to have dedicated arrow keys directly below the home row. Now I'm experimenting with having the arrows on the home row in a layer and that's got me thinking I might be able to go smaller. That coupled with recently finding http://asetniop.com/ has me entertaining crazy thoughts like having the home row chorded for alphas and then I've suddenly freed up 20 keys to use for other things... or possibly just remove those keys :O

You can see it in action in tests here (remember to expand rows too see results) or by some examples here

I developed something similar (PCB only, no cases) as KiCad plugin: https://github.com/adamws/kicad-kbplacer - it uses layouts from keyboard-layout-editor.com as input.

Once you get the hang of that, you can try using a tool to automate the key positioning stuff. There's a tool that repositions your keys given a KLE json (https://github.com/adamws/kicad-kbplacer and I used to use one called "Keyboard Layouter"), and there's a tool to actually generate the skeleton project for you as well (https://github.com/jeroen94704/klepcbgen). Just make sure you have a hang of KiCAD, footprints, symbols, etc before you dive too deep.