Hello everyone,
I came here via a long and winding road.
As a kid I admired inventors and dreamt of becoming one. As a teenager I used to joke that I could build anything as long as it is only connected by nuts and bolts and doesn’t require soldering. Ever since I tried and failed to repair my model railway I have been doubtful of my soldering abilities. Thus for the next 30 years I worked mostly on bicycles – which are basically screwed and bolted together, with the occasional need to saw or drill something.
Keyboards I only approached from the software side. I even used the Colemak Wide Mod bag of tricks to make my laptop let me type the letter E with my thumb!
This is also what brought me to mechanical keyboards: simply the wish to have proper thumb keys and program them to do nice things. And program my Iris CE I did! In any case, I always liked the software side of things more because of the infinite retries you get; no accidental breaking things like I somehow fried my transistors in the electronics play kit for teenagers – and then it was game-over and the end of it.
My current project is to make a study on thumbs vs keyboards: create a collection of keyboard layout drawings that can be printed to scale, so you can “dry-type” on them to see and feel which thumb keys fit your thumbs.
Seems like I can’t write the word “thumb” often enough! But fun fact: when typing on a phone screen, I hate using my thumbs. I prefer putting the phone down and then using the index fingers.
Here’s one of the layouts that I have invented[1]:
It’s a keyboard with – you guessed it! – thumb keys. It also has a widened hand position, which is good for ergonomics, lets you tap those grey keys with your index fingers instead of only the right pinky, and importantly, makes sure that your thumbs are not tapping on each other when tapping those central keys.
Here’s a simple remapping of some frequently used letters to fully exploit the home row and thumb keys:
If my dry-typing experiments produce encouraging results, I want to build the winner layout. Since I will probably have to do a bit more than just programming and bolting things together, this will also be a project of personal growth and overcoming my childhood fears of working on hardware.
Looking forward to sharing this journey with all of you!
Bob with two thumbs.
Tags: innovative layouts, keymaps, keyboard firmware, and (you guessed it!) thumb keys.
Most of the things that I have invented were already invented by somebody else. But I like to think that I still independently invented them! For this keyboard layout that I call “Thumbs Up”, I haven’t yet found a prior publication. But I’ll gladly acknowledge that I have reused and remixed a lot of ideas from other people in the design. The 1.75u width of the Return key, for example, can be traced back to Apple’s Lisa keyboard in 1983. ↩︎