My main board for darn near a decade was a Corsair K70 Lux RGB with Cherry MX Brown switches - over the years I’ve slowly grown more and more dissatisfied with the lack of tactility and weight to the switches, but I felt silly replacing a keyboard that worked perfectly!
So when we all got forcibly dragged back into the office full time the K70 went to live in my cubicle, and I purchased a Keychron V6 Max hot-swap to fill the void on my home desk after a bit of research I settled on Cherry MX RGB Clears and some cute cat-themed keycaps from thekapco. The non-ergo Clears are fantastic, but I was devastated to find out that the ones with rgb-friendly housings were recently discontinued by cherry
I also just recently grabbed a Keychron Q6 Pro in purple (thanks prime day sales!) I’m a huge fan of tactiles so I bought a few different switches to test out and see what I’d like to put in the q6. No photos yet because it’s still in the box but expect some soon!
I’m typing this from my new prose-centric Forty. I guess “prose-centric” is really more about the keymap than anything else (e.g. dash gets more priority than brackets, and no punctuation common in English gets demoted out of the base layer), but I can at least say I think I prefer alphastagger to full ortho. It’s much easier on my crunchy old brain. I swear to god, people who can quickly adapt to radically different layouts are secretly multi-instrumentalist musicians, while I’m still proud of myself for remembering Hot Cross Buns on the recorder.
DCS with some good old fashioned grab-bag Unicorn Barf. ZMK via the ZMK Shield Wizard. Epomaker Budgerigar tactiles. Masonite switch plate, 3D printed case with a kind of modified and obfuscated stack mount, and laser-cut thin ABS to supplement the bottom wedge that houses the RP2040 and six ounces of wheel weights. I don’t generally recommend cutting ABS, because as anyone who’s ever accidentally burnt ABS, it’s pretty stinky and toxic, but between quick cuts on thin stock, good ventilation, and a respirator, I was okay with it.
The keymap layers might get some additional tweaks, and I admit to my shame that I haven’t made the LEDs do anything yet, but the tools to do from-scratch builds have never been better.
Thanks. For how quickly it came together, I’m relatively pleased. I did tweak the keymap a little bit more to better match how I actually type, and specifically for things like emails and comments, I’m not really running all that slowly. Still a mental hurdle when I need to get into the layers, but for the most part they’re fairly intuitive. I also moved the firmware over to QMK/VIAL because ZMK Studio, at least as I had configured it in the Shield Wizard, didn’t use persistent memory to store keymap changes after disconnect (I’ve already fixed the visual layout in VIAL compared to those pics, LOL). It’s probably an issue on the other two boards I made with the ZMK shield wizard, as they’re also RP2040, but one was a TKL and the other was a keymap I have been using for over a year and didn’t really need tweaking, so I may be okay for now. For this lil guy, I think the flexibility will be necessary. I also have three of the four LEDs working, though as boringly traditional HID indicators, not fancy layer indicators, which is apparently NOT a standard part of any major firmware.
after a bit of research I settled on Cherry MX RGB Clears and some cute cat-themed keycaps from thekapco. The non-ergo Clears are fantastic, but I was devastated to find out that the ones with rgb-friendly housings were recently discontinued by cherry 
