My new mechanical keyboard has arrived!
Since I got my first iMac over a decade ago I have been making do with Apple keyboards. I like the aesthetic but the typing experience has always been pretty awful. Recently I have been finding myself mistyping more frequently, especially with mis-hitting the spacebar.
At the start of the year I decided it was time to go back to using a mechanical keyboard, but these days we are spoilt for choice and, unable to decide, I have been procrastinating ever since. I was very tempted by the ZSA Moonlander but buying one in the UK is a bit fraught, and I decided I'd prefer a low profile keyboard after many years of Apple keyboards. After some research I stumbled on the Sofle Keyboard with low-profile choc keys and got really close to hitting the "buy" button.
But I got nervous about having to learn to type again and got especially worried about adapting to layers and home row mods. After a bit of deliberation I realised that I quite like having all the symbol and modifer keys directly accessible so I went hunting for something a bit less ambitious:
- Familiar / easy to learn
- Mechanical
- Low profile
- Programmable (preferably QMK)
- 75% (tenkeyless)
- Split (if possible)
- Ortholinear (maybe)
It turns out that it's hard to get a keyboard that delivers all the items on this list. If you go for ortholinear or true split then it's not going to be easy to learn and the typical layouts have significantly fewer keys than a 75% layout. I eventually settled on the Keychron K15 Pro which has a split "Alice" layout, runs the QMK firmware and has all the Apple keys.
So I ordered it last month and, after an interminable wait, my new keyboard finally arrived in the post today.
This keyboard is only a couple of steps away from a standard layout so I feel confident that I won't end up struggling to adapt, or completely hating it.
- All the mod and symbol keys are there.
- It is a split layout, albeit still a single unit.
- It's programmable so I can experiment with layers.
First impressions are very encouraging. The split layout is a little bit unsettling but I have
already started adapting to it after a short while. This is not an ISO layout so the ~ and \
keys will take a bit of getting used to. The keycaps and low profile switches have a fantasic
feel and I am enjoying the split layout already after a few hours of use.
The VIA programming portal is such a breeze to use that I have already completed a few customisations:
- I reorderd the
home,pgupandpgdnkeys to be in a more natural order. - There's fewer navigation keys so I filled the gaps on another layer.
- I put a numeric keypad on a layer, reusing 7, 8 and 9 and the alpha keys below.
- My mouse only has a vertical scroll wheel so I have repurposed the rotary control for a horizonal scroll wheel.
There's plenty more to experiment with, though I am already wary of toggling different layers when there is no visual feedback about current keyboard state.