I write code for videogames!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • The keycaps are a part of this keyboard’s cost (Keebio prices a similar set that comes with Cepstrum at $52), though it’s not easy to find choc-spaced keycaps for cheap unless you 3d-print them.

    The primary drivers for the cost are likely the R&D work behind the keyboard and that it’s a keywell (with more complicated assembly process).

    Perhaps you could get a used one - IIRC there was a channel on MoErgo’s discord.

    If you mean the thing for strafing, there was a QMK pull request, though this is now being hastily banned from just about every competitive game. If you mean hall effect switches, I’m not aware of any keywell keyboards with them - there’s just a single 58-key (Lucca 58-HE) as far as column-staggered boards go.




  • The keyboard I’ve used for longest was K860 (which still works fine after 3 years and which I still like, though it is rather wide), and as for future works I’d like something between the current two keyboards being Sofle Choc (rotary encoders next to QWERTY B/N) and Redox (thumb cluster layout) with a couple tweaks to allow for closer-angled placement of the halves.

    However, no such keyboard seems to currently exist, so I’d have to either find the time to design and build one myself, or commission someone to do that for me.







  • 1. You can maintain a reasonably “normal” QWERTY layout if you regularly work with a bunch of different keyboards - e.g. mine looks like this on Sofle, and on Moonlander you could spread -_, =+, and brackets across some of those inner keys for added convenience (perhaps at a price of sometimes typing [ instead of a backslash).

    I occasionally press Caps Lock instead of LShift on row-staggered keyboards, but that is a price that I am willing to pay - same-row Ctrl+Z/X/C/V shortcuts just feel too good.

    The other option is to remap the laptop keyboard’s layout to be more like your Moonlander layout using system-level tricks (like registry/SharpKeys on Windows).


  • Depends on where you are in the world - e.g. here in Ukraine you can occasionally see an ergonomic keyboard or two among the office keyboards in electronics stores.

    From my own experience (having replaced my Sculpt with K860 when it came out) I’ll say that it feels pretty similar, but keys take slightly less force to actuate. Supposedly Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Keyboard is also similar, but I haven’t had a chance to try out that one.






  • I'm guessing that you have -_ key in top-right, =+ where [{ would normally be, and three of the arrows on the thumb row? I toyed with having 4 arrows on the thumb row for a bit and currently checking on having a navigation toggle layer that only swaps the letter keys on the right half.

    If you are comfortable with building your own, there's a good number of keyboards in this form factor - I made a list recently. There are similar-shaped keyboards with a slightly different key distribution like Egg58 or Cantaloupe, keyboards with slightly more keys like Redox and other ErgoDox derivatives, keyboards with asymmetrical clusters on the right like Breeze or ErgoNICE, 4x7 keyboards like Ergoinu, Interphase, or Kapl, and even a 4x8 Drift…







  • So what do people do with thumb clusters?

    In my current setup, I have a little tool to have remapped RAlt act as a faux mod layer (so that I can quickly enter symbols like · — ➜ or have two-key shortcuts that don’t conflict with anything), but most of the objective improvement comes from good auto-completion, snippets, and editor features (e.g. multi-cursors can be a blessing to both edit a bunch of lines at once and to create N constructs out of a list of names/signatures).