EclipseCON 2022 Talk: "34 keys is all you need: an ergonomic keyboard journey"

Description

In the latest years the custom mechanical keyboard scene has blown up significantly, reaching mainstream status among (not only) software developers. Nevertheless there's an overlooked niche of this hobby that greatly benefits from the open source ecosystem and the online community: ergonomic mechanical keyboard.

In this talk I'll walk you through the deep end of the custom ergonomic mechanical keyboard rabbit hole and explain why 34 keys is all you need (really!) and what are the benefits of such a keyboard.

Detail

In this talk I'll focus on various aspect of modern keyboards and their outdated design and walk through the improvements the open source community brought to this field.

• Hardware: Physical layout and how to improve on a design that dates back to the 19th century. Columnar stagger, split keyboards, thumb clusters and splay will be the keywords for this section.
• Software: How the open source keyboard firmwares changed how we use the keyboard. I'll talk about advanced firmware features like layers, mod-taps, caps word and combos.
• Layout: Functional layout and how the QWERTY layout was designed to slow you down (really!). I'll talk about modern alternatives like Dvorak, Colemak-DHm and Miryoku which leverages the more advanced features of modern firmwares.

Finally I'll put everything together and talk about my current daily driver: a 34-keys bluetooth split keyboard powered by the open source ZMK firmware and the Miryoku layout.

Viewing the presentation

A pre-built version of the presentation is available in the gh-pages branch, this version is built by a custom Github workflow from the master branch. Once this repo will go public the presentation will be available at https://mattdibi.github.io/eclipsecon-keyboard-talk/.

Building the presentation

These slides are using Marp Markdown Presentation Ecosystem. Usage documentation can be found here. Example here and here.

For building the slides in this repository using the official Docker image use the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/mattdibi/eclipsecon-keyboard-talk.git

cd path/to/eclipsecon-keyboard-talk

Convert slide deck into HTML:

docker run --rm \
    -v $PWD:/home/marp/app/ \
    -e LANG=$LANG \
    marpteam/marp-cli --bespoke.progress --preview slides.md

or use server mode (serve current directory in http://localhost:8080/)

docker run --rm --init \
    -v $PWD:/home/marp/app \
    -e LANG=$LANG \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -p 37717:37717 \
    marpteam/marp-cli --bespoke.progress -s .