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.

Well, it came out great! I’ve always liked the concept of ortho with normal keycap kitting, though it’s kind of amusing that you went with a custom and unsculpted set for the one and only ortho that didn’t need them. Absolutely no judgment, though. I have spent a lot of time making “bespoke” boards in my garage that are barely any different from commercial offerings.

Is that texture on the case from your build plate or the fancy new topside fuzzy skin algorithms?

WASD is dead. ZSA and Nuphy seem to be fine.

So, just in the past year or two they’ve finally released switches from new molds (“MX2A”) that are quite well regarded, but not special enough to make up for what must be very high operating costs. Unlike GMK, they squandered an early lead in the enthusiast space and never got it back. They just took much, much too long to relaize that the viable markets for mech boards are gamers and people with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the hardware itself, not just an aging cohort of office workers who refuse to put up with membranes.

I have a Unicomp (actually two, but one is the quirky rubber dome they made) from the early 2000s and a Scotland-made one from the 90s, and they feel pretty similar. I understand the biggest thing is just that molds wear out over time and eventually there was a little slop. I have heard, but can’t personally confirm, that the “New Model M” they sell has tightened things back up via new molds.

Somebody a few years ago was trying to cram a buckling spring mechanism into a Cherry MX footprint, but AFAIK it never went anywhere, and even the Asian market “Alps Buckling Spring” modules still actuated a membrane.

For actual buckling spring feel, people will recommend heavier Kailh Box clickies, but while they’re some of my favorite switches and generally recommend them to people who don’t need to worry about sound levels, they don’t feel like buckling springs to me but rather their own thing. I have some really cheapo “Outemu Dustproof Green” that I like quite a bit, actually, and feel a bit more like buckling springs, though I know we’re not supposed to like click-jacket MX switches. Nothing sounds like buckling springs though, not by a long shot.

1. “I like Box Whites. They’re like this delightfully gentle and quiet tactile switch,” he typed from his keyboard full of Box Navies on an aluminum plate.
2. Check out !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world, which is the only other active keyboard comm on Lemmy that I know of.
3. If I were to dabble in ergo mechs again, I think the 58-key to 60-key splits would be about my speed.
4. People have varying opinions about clones (for me, I feel for creators whose novelties get copied, but it is what it is with colorways), and you can get virtually any GMK or SP set cloned in XDA, so XDA ends up underrated as a typing experience.
5. Welcome!

lol, I have a lot of keyboards, many homemade, but I don’t think I’ve spent over a hundred bucks or so on any single one of them, and most are closer to half that. No Model F of any kind here, much less a new one.

If you want it badly enough, there’s the pricy “New Model F” capacitive buckling spring boards, and they have all three Model M layouts.

It’s electrically identical to a regular Model M, so almost certainly not. In looking into it, they changed three things:

• dense little rubber domes in each key’s barrel instead of the buckling-spring assemblies
• keycaps with stems that are mostly solid to actuate the domes. I put in a spare buckling spring keycap to see if it worked, and while nowhere near well enough to rely on, it snapped right in, and if you push hard enough it’ll actuate.
• removed a thin sheet of rubber that cushioned the membrane from the plastic flippers attached the buckling springs.

That’s it. Same controllers, same membranes, even the same cases.

Holy shit, you’re right. Very TNG era.

I have hunted and hunted for the short, but while I know exactly which keys are affected, I can’t tell why. One interesting development is that while working on another board I plugged the Focus in to check a USB converter, and it worked okay for a minute or so. That makes me wonder if I might get away with simply replacing the capacitors, as I know several of them are for cleaning up the signal. Focus’s engineers were bonkers AF with their value-engineering and never met a kludge they didn’t like, so as an English major with a soldering iron, who knows what hijinks they were up to. I didn’t see any tell-tale burnt-out caps, but the fact that “resting” helped even briefly is interesting. I may try that before I murder the PCB.

Thanks. Yours came out brilliant, btw. I think the old school sandwich cases are perfect for low-profile switches and caps. Mine here uses “half-height” or “dwarf” Outemus that have standard MX footprint, and a profile from Aliexpress called “JWA”.

For higher-profile designs, you can tweak the concept to stack additional layers (swill can generate them, but I still prefer to directly edit the DXFs after) and have the 3D-printed spacers extend out and around like a shroud. You can also just put some threaded inserts into a larger 3D-print and have a kind of top-mount.

Super satisfying, right? Mine are all in KMK, and I’ve only done one half-assed PCB design (I literally just left a linear row of vias to hand-wire to the RP2040), with the rest being hand-wires. When you’re done, and it works as well as a commercial keyboard but you can see all your choices made real, it’s really cool.

One of mine looks a tiny bit like yours:

Or maybe you wanna get real crazy…

This thing was designed in the waning days of DOS. They probably thought the same thing.

I haven’t played with vanilla Debian in forever, but if there’s a good “Software Center” style overlay to the package manager, I bet he could find some good stuff on his own. The “Discover” app in Ubuntu actually categorizes the games by genre. Pingus, Minesweeper clones, Sokoban clones, Poker, Chess, Checkers, Go, Reversi.

Yes. The system set up by the US Constitution was a reasonably good attempt for a country of several million people with different practical needs, entirely along the eastern seaboard, and with 1790s technology, knowledge, and attitudes.

The problem is that it has evolved pretty much the bare minimum amount to allow it to (mostly) continue to function. We are limping along on “Constitutional Republic version 2.27,” after version 1.0 was an immediate bust, but we need to be running 2.30 at least, and maybe even 3.0. We’re no longer feature competitive with many other Human Governance suites. :-)

There are many issues, but an “upgrade” to install Ranked Choice Voting, rebalance Congressional Representation, and maybe remove the Electoral College (depending on how the congressional representation thing goes) would go a long way towards keeping it viable.