My ergo journey started with similar requirements to yours - specifically including the Y and B keys. Along the way, I learned how important layers are for comfort, ditched QWERTY entirely for Colemak DH, bought a 3D printer, and ended up at 40%. Several years ago, there was a term “1KFH” (“one key from home”) people used to describe the amazing amount of comfort they found when they never had to move their fingers more than one key away from home position, nor to move their hands.

I’m not saying you have to change your requirements, now or ever, but I think people who start to make their own ergo keyboards may be subject to this sort of requirements drift, such that if they ever make it to the product phase, their products aren’t what they initially expected to be building. And maybe this sort of dynamic is what makes it less likely for the product you are looking for to have been built already.

It took me a couple months to stop thinking about layers.

My first move toward ergonomics was a Keebio Fourier 40%. It had been a few months before that when I started using Colemak on my laptop keyboard; I did that using Windows keyboard settings, and I was taking notes in meetings, so whenever I couldn’t keep up, switching back to QWERTY was a hotkey away.

After switching to the Fourier, and iterating many times on the QMK settings, that was the month or two where I had to think through all the control keys, symbols, and function keys I was typing. I didn’t quit typing on other keyboards, although I typed on my Fourier as much as possible; and I have not ended up forgetting anything I learned before.

I’m now on the precipice of moving from a 4x6 Dactyl Manuform to a 4x5 Splaytyl (if I can find those dang parts and get the thing built!) and that’s too small to have things like Tab, Enter, or the backslash on the home layer. I’m nervous. I’ve tried making a 4x5 layout for the DM, but haven’t ended up sticking with it. I couldn’t really get used to keys that are physically there, not doing anything.

No, I have not tried that. But I might now. :)

I’ve got a Thinkpad 600X (Pentium III, 256MB RAM). I put Debian 12 on it, and the OS is not quite small enough. (NetBSD couldn’t drive my particular CardBus Wifi card, sadly, and 9front couldn’t drive the NeoMagic video properly.) Just Emacs on the console, no X, and eww for web browsing (to your question) and elpher for poking around Gemini. I’m not familiar enough with Thinkpads to know if that’s a useful data point for you.

Nobody’s mentioned https://www.haiku-os.org/ yet, so I will. I can’t remember what happened with it on my Thinkpad. There are several graphical browsers there, with a range of capabilities, as well as a port of Emacs.

I guess my real answer is: don’t handle today’s internet with all of its heavy websites? Use the web for documents, and use native applications rather than web apps for other purposes, such as chatting and email.

I got a Keeb.io kit and soldered it myself, and then I’ve handwired a Dactyl Manuform and (halfway) a Splaytyl. I love how many people can build you a 3d-printed keyboard these days, but I’m already equipped and experienced to do it all myself.

I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes

Directions unclear; shoelaces tangled

Secure Scuttlebutt is (was?) a protocol for high-latency communication between occasionally-networked humans. Pro: https://scuttlebutt.nz/; con (not read in detail): https://derctuo.github.io/notes/secure-scuttlebutt.html. I think it was supposed to be able to spread messages over Bluetooth, assuming a sufficiently connected web of nodes between person A and person B. Public keys were identities, and were bound to devices; unfortunately people may have multiple devices, or change devices over time, so this was a hindrance.

IPFS was supposed to be the Interplanetary File System. I think that was just because whatever pieces of content you ask for, you also cache, as part of the design: you keep a copy on the near side of the small high-latency pipe. But that’s mostly about file transfer, not interactivity.

UUCP was definitely made in a time where a latency of days for delivery of email or netnews was common.

In the early days of CGI, the Web was just one way people imagined interacting with applications; another way was email. RFC 3834 has some recommendations for people who are going to automate email responses. There used to be services you could email a URL to, and receive the web page back as an email.

Using ed (in my experience) involves looking up the screen, or up the roll of paper on your teletype, to see what the lines of your file were, and imagine what they are now, given the changes you’ve wrought to them since they were printed, and then turn them into what they should be. With Mars rovers you have a simulation that you issue your command to, before sending it off to Mars. With correspondence chess you might keep a physical chessboard for each game you have going, and/or send a form back and forth that keeps track of several moves.

People used to do computation at universities and businesses by writing programs at their desks, submitting them to be typed on punchcards, and receiving printouts some time later. They would “desk check” their programs before sending them in, because each compute job took a couple days to come back.

I mention all these because, in an extreme censorship environment, any local state (session history on paper, an app on a smartphone, an odd device) might not be good to have around. So usability may require reducing the total amount of state that a command carries. The current working directory at the time a command is run changes the meaning and outcome of the command; you may not remember that directory in a day or two. The vocabulary and syntax of command-line switches are easy to look up in online manuals - but are there offline manuals? I don’t know if this avenue of inquiry helps you, but it’s interesting to think about for a moment.

I’ve been using a tshort dactyl manuform 4x6 for 5 years now, having never planned to use it for even 1 year. I only commonly use the two innermost thumb keys; I didn’t think I would like the thumb cluster from watching a video of someone typing on it, and I indeed don’t like the thumb cluster. The switches are Kailh Brown; one of them started to stutter and I replaced it with … a TTC Brown or some such.

I’ve printed, but not finished, a Splaytyl. I think it’s going to feel nice, but it’s only 4x5, and I’m nervous about not having Tab and Enter on the base layer.

Colemak DH represent!

CollapseOS used to emulate the Z80 using… libz80, i think it was called? lib6502 is also a thing.

Sure, go ahead :)

The Gemini capsule is yet to be done, but the wallpapers are available at https://j.agrue.info/wallpapers/

This post inspired me to go find the tiling wallpapers I made 20 years ago. I almost made a pull request about it, but then decided not to, because it’s GitHub. My wallpapers used to be on my own website, and now I’m going to make a Gemini capsule and put them up on that.

Yeah, I did one for my Dactyl Manuform and just oversized it by a couple millimeters and stuck Amazon bubbly envelopes on the inside. The bottom of each half is flat, the same shape, and rubberized, so the covers just go over the top, I clap the bottoms together (tee hee?), and chunk the whole thing in a lunch bag that barely fits. It stays together without slipping and without any attachment between the two cover halves. Janky but it’s worked for years.

That’s beautiful!

I 3d-printed a hard box for my Fourier. https://gitlab.com/jaredjennings/fourier-box. (wince, there is no photo nor even an STL in that repository.) I wanted it to fit in my backpack with a laptop and books, so it holds the two halves side by side, not stacked. I had to print it in two pieces and friction-weld them together. That sounds fancy, but it just means you take a piece of filament, put it in a Dremel chuck, and draw on your model. Wherever you push down, the friction makes the end of the filament melt. Then I put on some Sci-Grip 4 (dichloromethane), which further solvent-welded the joint.

If you wanted to make one like this for your cepstrum, you’d need to do it in more pieces because that’s larger than a Fourier. Your case would end up to be the size of a laptop. You might not want that.

Uh, I think the Glove80 uses Choc switches, right? For heavy tactile in Choc you would want Burnt Orange. Not sure whether that’s an option they provide or what.

Bastard Keyboards – I’ve talked with Quentin and he seems like a cool guy. He’s an innovator in the use of printed-circuit boards for keywell keyboards. That’s important because it makes keywell keyboards much easier and quicker to make, without the huge cost associated with polyimide flexible PCBs. He has high quality standards, too, in my limited experience of his products.

I agree that you should get a keywell keyboard. I haven’t read any specific reviews (I’m down the make-your-own rabbit hole instead), but I’ve seen some sentiment that the Glove80 is better than Kinesis’ offerings, and I believe it’s more programmable.

And about that last, if you “have to learn how to type again from scratch,” you should use a key layout that will work best for you. This may not be a layout that already exists! Colemak and all its variants, for example, put A and R under your left ring and pinky finger. You might want K and J there instead. Or if it’s easy to press the key your left ring and pinky are on, but hard to move them to a different key, you might be OK with A and R. Though Dvorak, for example, has left-handed and right-handed variants, I don’t think there are any predefined layouts for people who want to type more letters with their right hand than their left – or to be more likely to need to move fingers on their right hand more often than their left.

Carpalx is a body of work that lets you define the typing effort for each key, and finds an optimum key layout for you. I haven’t used it myself - Colemak DH is a sufficiently high local maximum of goodness for me and I haven’t gone down that hill to find a higher maximum yet. But the moment you’re in may afford you a unique opportunity.

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?typing_effort

If you do end up making one, or having one made, you might be interested in something like the Concertina.

I haven’t built a musical keyboard, but I’ve taken apart a home (electric) organ or two. I hear that one among the many options you have if a modern pipe organ is being made for you, is different strengths of magnets that initially impede your keypresses, like the pneumatic valves would if it weren’t electronically controlled; as well as different woods for your keys. There’s a channel on YouTube to which I’m subscribed where the guy is building his own tiny pipe organ (like, 30 pipes, the size of a large suitcase).

The hexagonal key layout mentioned by others, and also often seen on one side of an accordion, is one among several alternative musical keyboard layouts: the white and black keys are sort of a musical QWERTY. Not the best, but the largest installed base, the most likely for new people to learn, and the most likely to be attached to an arbitrary keyboard instrument you come upon.

I have a Folger Tech i3 2020, so named because its frame is made from 20x20mm aluminum extrusion. No bed levelling, no quiet steppers, no all metal hot end, five years old. I’ve added a part cooling fan whose nozzle I printed off Thingiverse, a janky ring of 24v LED lights, and a cheapo 0.6mm nozzle. Sometimes I have to print part of the first layer a couple of times and move the z end stop to get it right. It takes about 10 minutes every couple of months, so not a big deal.

I say this not to recommend this printer to you today, but to say that even if you don’t manage to get perfect prints out of the box, the fiddling it takes to get what you want is probably not that bad.

Besides keyboards, and an occasional toy car or something, I’ve printed a replacement shade for a little fluorescent kitchen light, an adapter to fit a lampshade that was on sale to a lamp that was on sale, a fancy toilet paper spool, and a custom wrench to try to remove my washing machine’s tub. Oh and brackets that hold my cell phone, so I can use my ergo keyboard to type at a terminal on my phone, broadcast my pirate signal, and hack into the Matrix, while riding the bus. :)