That’s a pretty good point (with layout I meant both colemak and ortholinearity (is that a word?)). I do think it’s additional work to learn colemak on a standard keyboard, but I guess you could go for it if you think it would pay off. I just prefer having the same keyboard for all my computers.

From my experience:

1. I typed around 60 WPM before on a standard keyboard, now it’s barely 25. It may be because I don’t use standard keyboards at all anymore though.
2. I learnt colemak with my first split keyboard since it seemed like if I was going to learn a new layout, then I should commit to it entirely. I think keeping AZERTY (since I’m french baguette haha) would have just made me even slower on standard keyboards because there wouldn’t be much difference with my normal workflow. Separating the two layouts entirely seems better to me, but you might also say keping the same layout to some extent is better.
3. I went from a full-size keyboard to my monkeyboard, gradually removed keys (left row, top row, inner thumb keys) and now I’m at 34 keys with my triboard. But making the jump could also have worked seems it’s a complete change anyway.

Yes, the main thing is you don’t have to pay for nice!nanos which are $25 each as I remember. XIAOs are only $10 each. The price I put on tarneo.fr is only as I remember it, might be a bit more depending on location and the shipping options you choose. But yeah I guess even with that it’s cheap.

Thanks! Looks like I’ve reached my goal ;-)

Not really, you get used to the small number of keys if that’s the question. It’s really just muscle memory after some time (I’ve been using this layout for around a year, iterating occasionally)

Thanks! Some people find the monospace font hurts their eyes though, but I guess it’s a tradeoff of the 90s theme

DIE

I’d like to keep the board as flat as possible, mimicking the TOTEM’s case which doesn’t add any height. This means I’ll have 0.2 mm between the main PCB and the bottom plate, and AFAIK there is no battery that would have the correct size for this.

Thanks, great suggestion! But as it seems it would make use of less common parts (I mean parts that can’t be gotten from local shops or ergo keyboard part sellers like splitkb), plus I think the batteries would be too small even compared to the 80mAh batteries used with nice!nanos.

Yeah, at first it seemed quite alright to do with a smaller angle (from 3 to 6 degrees depending on the battery), but now I think it would make the board too complicated. Right now I am trying to get used to sticky mod keys on home row combos (colemak A+S for LGUI, N+I for LCTL) and it seems like I’ll be able to remove the inner thumb key in the end.

Yeah, a dactyl kinda defeats the point of having a small keyboard. Soon I’ll try to make a 36-key split with some way to link the two parts to make it usable on laptops for example (rn it’s comically large when using a laptop: I need to put the two halves on the side plus a mouse if I don’t want to use the touchpad). I’ll also use sockets for everything (switches & XIAO controllers) so that the next one I make doesn’t cost as much.

2 row cluster

I could cut it off. The 5 innermost keys aren’t even used, and the one left over is just for (rarely) pressing alt, and that’s only on the left half. As for the top matrix row, it’s the same situation: I only use it for function keys which I only use for switching tty’s, and I know I would always ask myself “wait, how do I press f1/f2?” The outer keys are used for the enter key and print screen, which leaves 4 unused keys. That’s:

• 5 useless keys for the left thumb
• 6 for the right thumb
• 6 on each half for the top row which could be moved yo another layer, making the keeb smaller while only having to remember 12 logically placed f keys
• 4 outer keys on the 3 bottom rows

= 27 keys that could be removed. Yikes.

Now onto the xmodmap stuff: when I need to use the keyboard on a new computer, it will almost always be on an X11 Linux one, as that’s what my high school computers for IT use (the one specific to the classes I’m taking), and also what I managed to get my family to use. This means I’ll always be able to add the xmodmap stuff, plus it poses no problem to other users of the same account (if applicable) as it uses f13+ keys which nobody else would use (most people don’t even know these keys exist). I also like not having to change my keymap from us especially when doing work on server hardware (I sometimes physically access a think centre used for backups at renn.es, shameless plug). The configurator is not even really my thing anymore, I only ever change the config through the file nowadays.

Yes. But p10k has many downsides:

• requires using oh my ZSH, which alone is quite bad because of how much slower it makes the shell.
• is a piece of software you’ll have to either install on each new device or have the software in your dotfiles. Bad practice. I very much prefer having no additional dependencies or overhead, plus the way I do it I can do whatever I want without the limitations of a prompt made by someone else, for which I’d have to dig in a lot of documentation. Compared to this, I only spent half an hour making a prompt exactly how I like, which doesn’t add overhead and doesn’t require a third party piece of software which I’d have to install on every new device.

Free software tells you “do whatever you want, you’re free” but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM’s claim they are “open-source”, which basically means nothing: it’s far easier to say that than to claim it’s a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).

Here are a few nice ones, I can’t really pick:

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” - John Maynard Keynes

(You can also apply this one to proprietary software vs. Free software (don’t say open source in my presence))

“The tyrants are only great because we are on our knees.” - Étienne de La Boétie

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg

Use a non-chromium browser son that web environment integrity doesn’t work. (Librewolf)

I am self hosting matrix synapse, it’s actually much easier than XMPP with SSL certs generated by Caddy. Ejabberd doesn’t play well with them.

EDIT: with docker.

Main computer: Arch (BTW) because I am a WM user (awesomewm) and AL has no bloat to remove. Also because of the AUR.

Servers:

• main server is a gentoo beast. I chose gentoo because systems was actually causing some problems and reporting a “degraded” status. OpenRC is really nice after years of systemd :-)
• second server, used for backups: NixOS, for no particular reason. I might install Debian 12 on it one day.

I wasn’t born back then, but it would have been the fact that search results weren’t total crap like today: only reddit seems to offer decent results if you don’t want sites like wikihow to come up… I wrote a more elaborate blogpost partly about it.