Disclaimer

This is not intended for the average reader. Lots of keyboard jargon is used for the sake of convenience.

A Little Background

Just skip to the next post if you don’t want to hear my life’s story :D

I’m really into keyboards. In particular, mechanical keyboards.

I started just about how most people enter this space: “Clicky keyboards are cool”. Well, that is, until they were annoying. Since then, I’ve been on and endless pursuit of the “perfect” keyboard. Here’s a brief timeline, with my Typeracer speeds attached:

  • 2018 - 50 WPM
    • First keyboard obtained, generic 105-key mechanical keyboard with Outemu Blue switches.
  • 2019 - 70 WPM
    • The blue switches really got on my nerves, but I didn’t want to purchase a whole other keyboard, so I ended up getting some Gateron Brown switches, desoldered all my blue switches and replaced them.
  • 2020 - 80 WPM
    • While trying to play games, I noticed that my keyboard took too much space, causing me to ram my mouse into it unintentionally fairly often. I decided to finally switch to an Anne Pro 2 (a 60% keyboard) with Kailh Box Red switches. Definitely a great upgrade, and it was my introduction to the world of keyboard form factors.
  • 2022 - 95 WPM
    • June: I decided to get an “endgame” keyboard, the Akko MOD008. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a rather costly mistake, since it turned out that all the effort I went through to modify the keyboard to make it sound fantastic was voided the moment I wore my headphones while using my computer. However, I did learn quite a bit about material choices and acoustics, which meant this endeavor wasn’t completely in vain.

Now, this is where things get a little interesting.

In October 2022, I started to notice that my typing style became a limiting factor in my typing. For some context, I learnt typing in a rather weird way: chatting in a Minecraft server about Redstone engineering (That’s a story for another time). This meant that I learned to type with my left hand starting from the WASD-SHIFT-SPACEBAR hand position, which meant that my left hand had to leap all over the place. This caused an awful lot of errors while typing, but muscle memory built up over time and I got pretty fast at it.

However, I really wanted to crack that 100 WPM barrier consistently, and I felt that I could not continue that much further with my current typing style. For a short period of time, I tried out the conventional way of typing, using the home row. It felt extremely foreign to me, and due to the row stagger of conventional keyboards, I had to tilt my left hand unnaturally far inward, which felt extremely uncomfortable. I eventually gave up not just because of the awkward hand posture, but also because it was extremely difficult to undo my last decade’s worth of muscle memory.

At this point, I started to prioritize typing comfort over typing speed. In pursuit of this, I was introduced to the world of fully-custom split keyboards. With the sheer number of options available, I was ready to tackle a challenge in my typing.

So, in my previous attempt at improving comfort, muscle memory got in the way. To avoid that happening this time, I wanted to switch as many things as I could up. Here were the features I looked for:

  • Split keyboard
    • No more bending wrists inward when I can now have my hands at arbitrary angles.
  • Friendship ended with row stagger, now column stagger is my best friend
    • No need to have my fingers extend diagonally anymore.
  • Entering the 40-50% space
    • Less keys = less movement to reach any given key
  • Colemak-DHm as the new keyboard layout
    • Qwerty tends to use the row above the home row quite a bit. Here’s a pretty nice comparison. There’s also lots more that’s fantastic about the DHm variant, which you can read about in more detail here if you are interested.

That led me to the Corne, which I’ve found to work fantastic for my use case. I was using it on and off starting in October, but I decided to fully commit to it in December. It’s now July 2023, which means I’ve been using this as my main keyboard for about 8 months. I’ve recovered my typing speed to around 80-90 WPM, which is plenty in daily use cases, since I can’t even thing about things to type that quickly. And the icing on the cake is: I can seamlessly switch between Qwerty and Colemak-DHm! In fact, my Qwerty speed has somehow increased to about 110 WPM.

Next steps

Well, with that happy ending, why does this project exist? Haven’t I found the perfect keyboard? Well, around May 2023, I also built a similar split keyboard called the Ferris Sweep. It has only 34 keys, which is even fewer than my Corne’s 42! In addition, there are a few more features that were present in that board that I really wanted:

  • Much tighter spacing between the keys
  • Fully wireless via Bluetooth
  • More aggressive column stagger

That said, I still do like certain things about my Corne more:

  • More keys! (34 is just way too few that I have to use fancy features to use the keyboard to fulfill my daily needs)
  • It has a plate (It makes the switches, and therefore the keys, much more stable.)

And thus, I decided to create a compromise between the two, with additional added features to customize it to my liking!