Excellent! And just so I don’t send you off on a wild goose chase, “Electron” is not the app’s name, just the platform (a browser wrapper, basically) that VIA uses for its desktop app. It’ll be on VIA’s github page, if not their main page. Glad you got it all squared away though. That’s a truly silly default keymap for what I understand is a super nice keyboard.

Just in case you’re still looking…

1. If you’re on Linux, don’t use the VIA web app, even if the build guide says to. Download the Electron app because it knows to ask for the right permissions and doesn’t apply them to everything you browse. In either event, make sure you grabbed the json to upload.
2. That strikes me as odd that there would be no arrows enabled at all. If you still can’t get into VIA go to some keyboard tester and try literally every key with and without Fn. It shouldn’t take too long for a 60%.

For the Epomaker, not bad at all. You can either futz with your privacy settings to let it work in a Chromium based browser, or simply download the contained VIA app. I dual boot, so I haven’t tried to install or run software from RK or Redragon or any of the other brands still using proprietary software. It might work, but honestly I am just not sure. If you do have to dig up a Windows PC, any changes you make should be stored on the keyboard itself and will be persistent across reboots. On the plus side, it isn’t so much the driver you have to be woriied about. It is just USB HID. The onyl issue is whetyher you’ll be able to remap keys and adjust lighting without resorting to whatever Fn+Key combos Royal Kludge builds in.

As I mentioned, Epomaker are no saints, and stories of their poor customer support are numerous. Buy from a third-party retailer (Amazon works well if you can stomach it) with a generous return policy and assume you’ll need to make a final decision by the time the return window closes. Beyond that, they just commission factories to do a run of a given board and re-badge it. Sometimes no one else does the same board, sometimes several someones do. They’re a glorified White Label, but that has the benefit that sometimes the hardware itself is quite nice.

For the switches, the same basic types still exist as with Cherry, but that market has exploded since their patent ran out. There’s still clicky (self explanatory), linear (smooth action on press), and tactile (a bump of some sort that requires extra pressure to overcome, but not intentionally noisy). There are also still multiple weights. The original Cherrys and clones are still around as a baseline: Red = Light-medium Linear; Brown = light-med Tactile; Blue = medium clicky. Heavier versions of each are Black, Clear, and Green, respectively. If the name of the switch is any more complicated than that (e.g. “Epomaker Wisteria,” or “Holy Panda” or the like), you need to parse the listing to see if it’s the type of switch you’d like. Switches also frequently come lubed from the factory these days, which can be nice for Linears and Tactiles.

I haven’t tried that board, but yeah, your options in that range are limited. I might consider instead the Epomaker Split65. You lose the macro keys but gain a knob and VIA. Neither RK nor Epomaker are particularly good citizens when it comes to respecting the QMK open source license, but the actual usability of the Epomaker on VIA is going to be better, and sometimes they contribute their firmware back. Low-end closed-source Keyboard software is generally quite bad.

Actual typing quality could be a deciding factor. To that end, I’ll happily let others weigh in. Worth noting to make sure you get switches you like, which may mean getting replacements. The RK seems to have “fast linears” (so early actuation point and often a fairly light spring) or Browns (tactile, and generally no better than “okay”), while the Epomaker has somewhat light linears (45g) or very light linears (45g).

It’s most likely for the thumbs, which are not quite as agile as other fingers and hit keys at a different angle. Even then, the 1.25 is probably more “nice” than “necessary.”

Yup. I just got a “modern vintage” industrial board that has similarly iffy stabs and even nonstandard stab spacing for the spacebar, and while I could probably dremel out the plate, I’d have to disassemble the board again and desolder the switch, then put it all back together, and THAT’S for a single plate-mount. So, nope, it keeps its original caps and stabs until something is just too perfect.

The bliss theme, complete with activation notice, is very nifty, LOL.

You can extend the matrix across so it becomes one board, but it means custom wiring the connector.

Yeah, physically that will work. I should have mentioned that, as it’s what I did (permanently wired) on my failure of an ergo split to get it split at all with one MCU, but electrically it worked perfectly fine. Proper USB-C/Thunderbolt like the caravan 2 seems like it would be a good solution for a PCB, and I’m curious what issues the mini HDMI produced (crosstalk maybe, or just complaining about sourcing mini to mini cables?). Ethernet or DB9 should do for hand-wired, though obviously bulkier.

I will admit I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of a split keyboard that was viewed as one unit by the host device AND that had more than two parts. I don’t think the usual suspects for firmware will support that, though I could be wrong. That said, if you can live with more cords there’s no particular reason you couldn’t make it a split keyboard and two macro pads, or two split keyboards. To the computer, “keypresses is keypresses” for the most part. In any event, this could work out fine in several different approaches.

I’ll echo @junderwood@lemmy.world and say that I don’t believe there are any commercially available half-height keyboard switches with proper keycaps, though I’m sure there are various pushbutton switches that could give you the basic functionality. Still, I might write that one off for now.

For the layout, your stagger looks modest but fine; that’s very much a personal thing though, and I completely borked it on my first (and only) split board. One other thing I didn’t love about my split was having two vertical tiers of thumb keys. Thumbs are strong but short and move differently. Clearly it can work, but more often you’ll see the arc extended rather than stacking. In any event, I’d recommend at least printing up a full-size copy of the layout and seeing how your fingers will need to move to hit everything you’d like. It’s far short of a full mockup, but it would have a great value-to-effort ratio. :-)

For the numpad, I don’t know your use case but backslashes aren’t commonly used for math (right?) or data entry so I might move the dot/comma separator onto that group of four and park backslash somewhere else. The keymap beyond that should be fully programmable, so maybe just don’t spend big on custom keycaps until you’re sure you’ve settled in on something you like. A lot of people at !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world (and elsewhere) will use all blanks or blanks on the mods.

I have a Ducky One Mini, so a 60%.

Likes: Better build quality than most plastic-case boards. Genuine Cherry switches, while not quite the selling point they used to be, are better than commodity clones. Convenient DIP switches for a few common settings. Everything just generally feels decent and solid.

Dislikes: Not hot-swap, though I think the One 3 might be?. Kinda pricy at MSRP, but if selection is limited then it is what it is. I do thoroughly dislike that for my board the complicated and obtuse on-board remapping/macro functionality is the only way to do it. If either of the ones you’re looking at supports on-PC software, even Windows, do it. This may be less of an issue if this will be your primary board and you won’t have to change things up often.

Along with Filco, they sort of are what they are: high quality but non-hobbyist Taiwan-designed boards with design philosophies that are just now creeping out of the 2010s. That’s not strictly meant to be a criticism. I often use boards that are literally from early 90s, but it does sort of describe a certain set of expectations about materials, performance, programmability, etc.

If anyone hasn’t played it, Endless Sky is a lot of fun, a top-down space trading simulator/shooter. In particular the “fun value” on low-end hardware is really good, and it handles casual session play pretty well as long as you don’t get involved in a long run or big battle when you can’t spare a few minutes.

Late to the game on this one, but Thomas “Chyrosran22” reviewed this board. I watched it a while ago, but IIRC, it boiled down to “pretty mediocre board, but fine, elevated by the keycaps.”

This. I’d say it’s perfect for people who don’t want to tinker at all, and it’s excellent for experts who either know or will enjoy learning how to make its containerization/sandboxing/whatever approaches work out. “Tinkering” is the specific doughnut hole where it is a problem. I replaced it with Tuxedo OS because I was frustrated with trying to set up the toolset for the QMK keyboard firmware, and it turned out there’s a whole layer of things you have to do to make it work, and some of the simpler ones simply break the immutability. A few other tools I wanted to use were running into similar hurdles.

NOw, it’s not that I beleive any of this stuff was a showstopper for everyone; I have too much confidence in the community for that. I am just old and dumb and while I love using Linux, I don’t necessarily want Linux itself to be my hobby. Now all that said, my Minecraft and Starfield installs were working really well on Bazzite, and I haven’t done any gaming in recent weeks so I hope they’ll be as good on Tuxedo.

Hand wiring can be a lot of fun. I have done about a dozen boards, including the “pocket battleship” I use for work everyday. This looks perfect.

Did you go with KMK?

For the very basics of KiCAD, their own intro is helpful. I had to wrap my head around the workflow: first schematic, then PCB.

Once you grasp that, some keyboard specific stuff is described by Joe Scotto in this video. He tends to rush his tutorials though, so best to go through the KiCad page first or revisit the video after.

For resources, I found Ai03’s library of footprints to be perfect, except that his vertical 2U were not oriented how I needed them, which I realized too late, LOL. Then, the kbplacer plugin by adamws was absolutely invaluable and saved me so much time. I used JLCPCB, because even when US-China tariffs were at their worst (and goodness knows they could be again if Trump gets a hangnail or something), JLC was still the cheapest option for me.

If you’ve never done a PCB before, I might humbly suggest keeping to a fixed layout for the first go-round. I did that on my first board and it worked perfectly for what I intended it to be. I got a little ambitious with this one, and ambition+inexperience+impatience led to a flawed project.

SKCM white. Both switches and keycaps (and the front feet, actually) came from a fried early-90s Focus keyboard that had a trackball where the arrow keys go, and the arrows were around it on mouse micro switches with little flappy “buttons” that are part of the case, also very mouse-like.

For the PCB, lots of YouTube and searching Geekhack, deskthority, and (yes) Reddit to see how to use KiCAD for mechanical keyboards. Mine uses the “cheat” of mounting a Raspberry Pi Pico clone to the underside so I don’t have to know as much about electronics (that part actually went perfectly).

The mistakes were two tiny bits of trace that got deleted but I didn’t see, and some placement issues for the Alps version that I had to work around. I have four of them left, so I’ll just use MX compatible switches and a normal sized spacebar for future builds and avoid the worst of it.

I just wiped Bazzite in favor of Tuxedo OS. I liked Bazzite a lot until I wanted to do the faintest wisp of development (setting up a new DIY keyboard with QMK). At that point I realized I’m in a very specific doughnut hole where I will occasionally want to do things that are still not mindlessly simple on an immutable distro, but I’m still untutored enough to need the walkthroughs that never include how to properly layer or sandbox stuff without just fucking up the very immutability that made it a good idea in the first place.

Shame though, as it was dead easy to install and use for basic productivity and especially games. A person with different needs and/or more skill would do very well with it. In the meantime, Tuxedo seems like a good snap-free Kubuntu alternative, and I’ve been floating around in KDE-running Debian derivatives (off and on) for decades.

Get any QMK board with enough keys and the other features you need, particularly if its got a VIA/VIAL config. It’s inherently programmable (literally every key) and cross-platform. The “easy” answer here would be a Keychron, but there are others.

If you can drop in size just a touch, where you still have a numpad but a small number of keys are moved, removed, or resized, then there are many enthusiast and near-enthusiast boards with “96%” or “1800” layouts, the main difference being whether the arrows, F-row, and numpad are fully compacted into a rectangle or slightly separated to guide your hands.

The very specific combination might not have been done, but full size PCBs are out there, especially as replacements for vintage boards. If you don’t mind ISO and only a row of LEDs rather than per-key, there’s THIS, which seems to have Bluetooth. They seem to have made some interesting choices with the numpad as well, which is for the most part NOT electrically distinct from the numrow.

There’s also this collection, which might send you in the right direction. If you can do some coding in QMK/ZMK, you might be able to make one of the BLE enabled Pro Micro clones work.

67g would be a good number to pop into various search engines. For the Outemus, the Oranges are sort of intended to be a slight refinement of their basic brown. I’m not surprised you found them similar feeling.

Zealio tactiles are supposed to have some pre-travel, as are “Moyu Blacks/Everglide Dark Jades”. I haven’t tried either, but it seems more common to push the tactile event to the top front of the curve than to leave it in the middle. NovelKeys Cream Tactiles may be have some weight and pre-travel as well. The force curve for Kinetic Labs Penguin also looks promising.

One outside the “box” (LOL) would be Kailh Box MUTE Jade. These are “silenced clicky” switches that are supposed to have a very distinct event in the middle but not have the sound profile that we clicky degenerates love but so many people don’t.