Finally dusted off my XD75 and my Seriko switches (silent linear with dampened upstroke). The lightbulb moment was when I realized I could fit a 65XT layout in a 60% form factor. Prototyped it yesterday with MTNU 800 OS2.0 which I think looks lovely. Behold the XD75XT:
There are a few keycap issues (aren’t there always?)
- No R3 1U enter so I have the R1 800 key there instead (though the tactile/haptic variation from the neighboring keys does help differentiate between the enter key and the rest of the 1u soup).
- There are no 2u or 3u keys that have the right stem spacing to fit the split spacebar keys (backspace and space) so I
made dohacked the shit out of it by trimming some matches down to fit into the keycaps and which bottom out at just the right spot. Is it perfect? hell no. Is it ok for testing until I 3D print something better? sure. It does tilt and bind annoyingly. I suppose the real solution would be caps that have properly placed stems for multiple switches.
I put 4 NK Creams on the arrow cluster, and I’m shocked at how much louder they are. They’re roughly the same weight, but the audible difference is good feedback when using the nav cluster. I’ve talked about the “haptic wall” concept before (credit to @XTaran for the name), but I still think the ideas of varying keycap feel/profile and switch weight/type are worth exploring for differentiating areas of a keyboard where blockers can’t be used to isolate them. To that end, I also flipped the spacebar to differentiate it from backspace.
I think I might have to solder this bad boy up and give it a whirl. Maybe I don’t need to buy a 65XT 
(who am I kidding, I still want the AKB OGR2!)
EDIT: No need to solder! I realized it’s actually the XD75re (hotswap) variant. Even better!