Wrench 59

This is a rough brainstorm for a 60% keyboard made for hacking code. Blue shift keys coorespond to blue legend marks. Bronze FN key cooresponds to bronze legend marks.

View on keyboard-layout-editor.com

Design Goals:

• 60% keyboard good for hacking code.

  • Writing code makes heavy use of symbols and arrow keys. I want a small board designed for hacking code.

• Move symbols closer to the home-row.

  • Moving symbol keys closer to the center of the board will mean spending less time resetting my hands to home-row position.

• Top level arrow keys

  • I use arrows all the time when coding, but many 60% boards omit them. So compromises were made to keep them on the top level.

• Reduce reaching

  • This board is 13.25 horizontal units wide and has a maximum of 13 keys per row. This means less reaching to find keys, which can be especially challenging in combination with holding modifier keys.

• Do something more useful with caps lock key

  • Caps lock is worthless and it sits on some valuable real-estate. I wanted to use it for something that is more commonly used in hacking code and that something is the apostophe.