My adventures in mechanical keyboards led me to building a Planck this week. A Planck is a 40% ortholinear keyboard with no dedicated number keys, and only 47 keys in total. It was more straightforward to build than I expected, and I’m slowly getting used to typing on it. It’s probably not something I would ever want to use as my main keyboard unless space was at a real premium, but adapting it to the way I work will be an interesting challenge, and might even mean I end up writing a custom i3 config file just for this keyboard (because I use numbers a lot, and it doesn’t have any).
I do like the idea of it though, and will definitely spend some time each day learning to type quickly on it, as I think it might make a great travel keyboard if I ever get round to travelling again.
I also think I want some different keycaps, which at least have the names of the keys written on them. The ones I got are ok for testing that everything works, but they have symbols on all the modifiers, and it’s taking me longer to remember which key is which. I’m not finding anything cheap and functional, so I suspect I’ll throw some money at this at some point or at least see what I can throw together from things I already have
Because the Planck is a 40% keyboard, a lot of keys are on layers, and these are a few of the ones I think I’ll need to use the most:
- Numbers –
Lower + qwertyuiop - What you usually get when you press shift and a number key –
Raise + qwertyuiop - Refresh –
Lower + g - Page down –
Raise + / - # –
Raise + m - Hyphen –
Raise + j - Underscore –
Lower + j
This keyboard has a steep learning curve, but I suspect once I have learned then it will be a really pleasant typing experience.