My Journey to a 36 key keyboard

Long, long time ago I was a happy VS Code user, on a good old QWERTY keyboard with a nice single piece 80% wireless Logitech keyboard. Then one day woke up and seen some YouTube videos. They were mostly about productivity, VIM and as such.

That time I was already invested heavily in the creation of an ergonomic home office setup. At that time I had a good monitor, desk, chair, and I was on the way to call it done. However, the keyboard is a central part of many ergonomic setups. This is how I started checkin out split keyboards and from that point I got lost in the rabbit hole.

After a long research I decided to open my wallet instead of learn how to solder a keyboard together and ordered the Moonlander keyboard from ZSA. The quality and ease of use was incredible on that thing. Though I still sucked a good month with it before I got anywhere near to my previous typing speed.

Moon landing

I used to keep the old keyboard closely in case of emergency (aka needed to reply in group chats) and I trained hard the touch typing. I did not properly do it before and now since I had no keycap labelling I had to do it. It was really nice to see myself improve during the process.

I also played around a lot with different layers, and came up with many crazy shortcuts and such. However, I realized after a while that it has a huge tax on me. First, I need to remember the layers and not doing so does me a huge disservice. Second of all I learned my custom shortcuts, but I still did not know the shortcut for the app, making me worse overall without my keyboard in the long run.

Slowly I also realized one more thing, Moonlander thumb clusters were too big for my hand to comfortably reach it and I started to have some pain in my hands when using it for an extended period of time. This also meant I had to move around my hand on the keyboard a lot and with every movement of the palm I usually made mistakes in typing.

Learning from the experience I decided that I need to use some sensible layout. This is when I discovered a super logical layout (for me) and a pretty popular one: miryoku. This layout uses 36 keys and 7 layers to have a super compact but completely usable setup.

I checked all the boxes, it was compact so no much hand movement. It was logical so easy to learn, and it was simple, so I still had to remember the system and app shortcuts to use it.

One small problem: it was using Colemak-DH layout for the initial layer. So off I go learning to type again. I got up to speed again within a month. If anybody interested, that does not mean that I cannot type anymore on any other generic QWERTY keyboard. Using Colemak for a year and I still retain 95% of my original speed on my old keyboard.

Corne 36 key keyboard

My logic: if I am happy with 36 keys, and all I need is 36 keys, why do I have a huge keyboard where I do not use more than half the keys? So I went and got myself a smaller keyboard. A popular option was the Corne keyboard, which could have been a 42 key variant, but I opted for 36. In retrospect, I could have gotten the bigger one since gaming with one half (18 keys) is a bit limited, and I need to have custom mapping for each game.

I got the keyboard in pieces and I got myself a nice cheap soldering kit and spent 2 hours with zero experience to solder it all together from the guide. It worked on first try. I also self printed the case for it, which was pain as I had to redo it 3 times and I do not own a 3d printer.

Since then, I am using the small Corne daily, helped with my wrist pain, I am fast and unlocked a lot of shortcuts potential with the great layout. The fact that the keys are mechanical, flat and close by to each other is much more comfortable that I ever expected it to be.

Summary

I recommend.