The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • miryoku

    Miryoku is an ergonomic, minimal, orthogonal, and universal keyboard layout.

  • One of the most popular layouts along these lines is the miryoku layout https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku

    To me the key concepts behind this are:

    - Home Row modifiers: putting Shift, Ctrl, Gui, Alt behind tap-hold functionality on the home row keys. (Now you don't need to strain your pinky finger with these, and can stay on the home row more).

    - More thumb keys, with layering using tap-hold. This brings Backspace, Enter, Esc, Tab to within reach of the thumb, and provides a bunch of layers.

    - Patterns on the LHS: Use of numpad idiom instead of number row (covering symbols, and function keys); symmetrical brackets, paretheses, and curly braces.

    - Use of the HJKL idiom for stuff like arrow keys, volume control, home/end. etc.

  • Sweep

    Sweep - a small promicro based keyboard inspired by the Ferris. (by davidphilipbarr)

  • The keyboard rabbit-hole gets pretty deep. I started off wanting a nicer typing experience, and ended up realising so much about the traditional keyboard designs didn't make sense to me.

    For me the optimum is a split 34-key keyboard (the open-source Ferris Sweep https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep) with a custom keymap firmware (QMK).

    Going deeper, you can generate a PCB layout that's personalised for the shape of your hands: https://github.com/ergogen/ergogen

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • ergogen

    Ergonomic keyboard layout generator

  • The keyboard rabbit-hole gets pretty deep. I started off wanting a nicer typing experience, and ended up realising so much about the traditional keyboard designs didn't make sense to me.

    For me the optimum is a split 34-key keyboard (the open-source Ferris Sweep https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep) with a custom keymap firmware (QMK).

    Going deeper, you can generate a PCB layout that's personalised for the shape of your hands: https://github.com/ergogen/ergogen

  • curvislicer

    CurviSlicer: Slightly curved slicing for 3-axis printers

  • A while ago I tried using CurviSlicer to FDM-3D print a keycap. It modifies G-code to make slightly-curved top surfaces.

    The top of the keycap was nice, and wouldn't have needed any finishing. However, the slicer messed up the sides/insides of the keycap. Someone more motivated could try applying the curviness only to the 'dish' part of the keycap.

    Curvislicer: https://github.com/dhardy35/curvislicer

  • kmonad

    An advanced keyboard manager

  • Basically kmonad allows your home row to be modifiers on hold, and Karabiner allows combos [1]. These are both functionalities that are readily available with QMK. Ultimately QMK can do anything you can think of with a little bit of effort. If you aren't set on sticking with the built-in keyboard, the mech keyboard rabbit hole is really wonderful.

    1: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad/issues/227

  • clarityqmkkeymap

    Clarity QMK Keymaps

  • Sure, it's here.

    https://github.com/tss101/clarityqmkkeymap

    It's in a bit of a rough state (one layout is for a 42 key + OLED Corne r2g, and another is a still messy modification for a 34 key Ferris Sweep)

    The keymap itself is pretty straightforward. It's just a modification of Miryoku (https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku), with some tweaks I made to keep functionally similar layers together. E.g. the mouse key and navigation key layers are mirror images of each other. And there's a numpad layer, with nested symbols and fn key layers that stack from the initial numpad layer.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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