This is a really good read, thanks for sharing it! I'm currently in the process of deciding how to move forward with the sale of the keyboard I designed so this is all really relevant information for me.

Here it is! (Sorry I’m guessing imgur wasn’t really what you had in mind when you said not a centralized platform)

Honestly it was a joke that got out of hand

Oh yeah I can upload it to imgur or something

Well said

Haha it was at my wife's family cottage for decades and we tried to sell it in a garage sale but nobody wanted it so it's been sitting in our basement for several years. I had a SNES and N64 hooked up to it for a while but didn't play them much so now it's back in the basement.

Also getting a screenshot of a typing test on it was kind of a huge pain and I probably did it in the most convoluted way possible. But in the end I was super happy with how the shot turned out, especially since a friend of mine made this insanely cool video out of it.

In a good way or a bad way?

I'm almost always on Mac so I don't need Ctrl much but it is in a layer when I do need it.

It’s honestly really useful having the three keys off to the right. You can just map them to macros or something.

I write JavaScript on the tiny ones so I have to type a lot of () and {} and stuff. It took me a little while to get used to.

Also I have them mapped so that QAZ are Esc, Tab, Shift. So all letters are accounted for on layer 0.

That, my friend, is the keymap of the future.

I haven't tried home row mods, but I really should. I use a Mac most of the time, so most of the stuff I would do with F keys is just mapped to media controls on the third layer. I've barely even used any of the QAZ boards on Windows since I pretty much only use W for gaming.

Here's the map I've been using for the past month or so. I use pretty much the same layout minus the macro keys on the Vault 35.

I also have used this unhinged map and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It's the default map that I wrote for the firmware.

And then I started trying out this gaming layer on the Vault last week. Still getting used to it.

So about gaming… A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I was gaming and my friend told me I was playing poorly because of my keyboard so then we got in a fight. I usually use a 65% for gaming but last week someone convinced me I could use the Vault 35 (green one on the bottom left) so I tried it last week. It went okay after I got everything mapped the way I wanted but then at one point I accidentally turned off my gaming layer and the friend who I got in a fight with in the dream started to get annoyed so I pretended my game was messing up. Then I came clean the next day and he said "fuck you".

Moral of the story is I'm going to continue gaming on the 35%.

It's got lubed KTT Strawberries in it right now. I was going to go with North Poles but I could not get them to fit so I put those in the Mod 005. The caps on the KBt are Drop Dasher which I fell in love with after watching Severance.

I've never found them uncomfortable, but I'm pretty small so maybe that helps.

That psychopath would be me (for the pink one and the black one, the green one is a vault 35). If you want to have your eyes opened, the black one with the QAZ on the right has an interest check going on now.

Thank you!

The 40s gang would love to have you.

Even for people who do touch type, there's a definite learning curve when you move to a 40% or lower board. I found that the muscle memory starts to build up pretty quickly so after a bit of stumbling around I got used to smaller keyboards without too much trouble. The main problem now is when I try to write code on anything larger than a 40% I make constant typos.

It started as a joke for my friend who doesn’t understand how I use a 35% but then some people seemed interested so I actually made it.

I’ve been using it for about a month now and use the QAZ keys for macros. I have tried actually using them as Q, A, and Z, too and it was actually easier than I expected.