Combo

I somewhat very recently posted about How a 36 keys keyboard suits my needs as a developer.

And thanks to a fellow reader @Kaze, the brain behind the Lafayette layout, I was able to reduce even further down without reducing my typing speed. Even better, I was able to do so while getting rid of the tap dance feature.

In this post I’ll show how I did such a thing by following the step-by-step trial and error I went through. And guess what: if 36 is too much, so is 34. Let’s go down right to 32 keys!

I like keyboards. A lot. I like them so much that I started building my own. And once built, programming them, making them answer my needs way better than any pre-built keyboard.

Using a tool I built daily was a pleasant experience. Little by little, I got a better grasp of what I really needed and what did not matter after all. Every iteration of the build-program-use cycle led to a better-suited tool. Until I reached my end-game, a keyboard so handy that I stopped building more and stopped updating the firmware: the final iteration.

Of course, this is a myth, practically a running gag in the small community of people making their keyboards. There are always some small improvements, and some finicky issues to address, this journey never really ends. That being said, I’ve been using the same setup for almost two years in a row now. And I feel like sharing why and how, as a software developer, I went from a full 105 keys to a 36 keys split keyboard as my daily driver.