You cut an entire column of the main area and made it more symmetric by doing that!
Yes, that was the idea but mainly to reduce / combine less used keys.
I think your layout should get a proper name, so it can become more widely known.
I’m flattered but we are a minority that like it (I have shown it around already) and it’s not perfect (? key missing), also the layout you see is already a revised one. The original layout was even more radical - especially with 2x2.75u space bars and 1.75u Enter - pain to get keycaps (although these days we have Yuzu for such cursed layouts).
Do you have open-source plate and PCB files for it?
Unfortunately the PCB designer went awol but if you interested I do have spare PCB and plate file or you can even have the whole keyboard that looks like this because I have since moved from integrated numpad (not to so needed any more) and went for utilising left hand more with this compact layout that is an evolution of the original idea but uses “normal” keycaps.
Woah, this is even better! Goes a lot into the direction that I have designed for lately… only that I am going for a wider hand position; one reason is to make thumb keys easier to access:
(Yes, that “render” is generated by AI, but based on a screenshot from my layouting tool which also keeps track of key sizes.)
I went for all keycaps <= 1.75 to make the keymap as customizable as possible. My dream is to actually produce this with a lot of extra keycaps of different sizes, so that people can customize their keymap as much as possible. Basically a platform for a software-defined keyboard. If some new trend emerges (like a GenAI key or anything app-specific) you don’t buy a new keyboard with that key, but just remix your current one.
Interesting layout and your dream is already possible with uniform PBS or PFF profiles at Yuzu. Means that you don’t need to produce massive kit with redundant keys - everybody can modify and order custom set for themselves.
What tools did you use for this? Can you detail your toolchain/prompt engineering? I haven’t yet found an image generating AI that doesn’t make a keyboard look like a Lovecraftian horror. (I’m setting aside the legend positioning for now, given that it looks like it got all the keycap widths correct)
I tried this with both Gemini and ChatGPT and I think the posted result is from Gemini. The prompt was:
create a photo-realistic image of a low-profile keyboard in the style of NuPhy or Lofree. The keyboard should have exactly the layout shown in the picture: every key should have the exact same size, every label should be the same.
this worked on first try for the Thumbs Up 16/5, but it didn’t work at all for the Thumbs Up 15/4. On the latter, it used conventional key sizes mixed with some of my labels, so the result was useless. And in both cases, the preview looked ok, it’s what I shared above, but downloading a high-res version yields an image with some weird extra artifacts that made it unusable.
So, in short, I don’t have a recipe, except for keep trying, because models improve. Also for some cases it helps to generate some code with Claude Code. I have no experience with actual rendering software, but I think if such software takes some form of code as input, Claude could generate that. Just as it generated some of my app. You could ask it to use an export from keyboard layout creator or similar as a base to get good accuracy.
