I personally use a 3x6 Corne for non-gaming tasks. I would recommend it for anyone that uses a keyboard for more than a few hours a day to preemptively reduce the risk of RSI, especially programmers. The small layout and tenting reduce wrist and finger strain significantly, to the point where when I have to use a regular keyboard at work I can quickly notice the pain in my right pinky. If you want something with curved key wells the Dactyl Cygnus is a Corne-like option. I haven’t bothered to try anything smaller since I don’t see the point (for non-steno), as all keys on a 3x6 are within 1u of the home row.

65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.

Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.

For people who like small keyboards I recommend you checking out the planck and preonic keyboards from olkb.

https://olkb.com/

I built my first planck by soldering each keyswitch. That's no longer required. My latest preonic I bought fully-assembled and it works great.

> I Like Small Keyboards

I like quiet keyboards but finding non-laptop / non-membrane keyboards that do strip the leather from your wallet, is a almost impossible task. Let alone one that does not grow in noise level over time!

There is way too much focus on a entire enthusiastic click click keyboards, but everything that i keep finding, sounds like absolute horrible loud, in a quiet room, where your partner is sleeping in.

And when you find something, its often a import, not in stock, and you get presented with like a $300 bill and no guarantee about quietness after a long time using. Or worse, they changed the keys in between production runs, and its now more louder.

Why am i writing this? Don't know, maybe tired of often wasting hours seeing youtube videos and reviews, and posts about keyboards to just feeling burned out.

I haven't gotten down to the 40s, but my daily driver is a 62-key Dactyl Manuform Mini. Admittedly, 3 of those keys are sound driven, so I could see getting down to 58 pretty easily, but after that, I'm not sure what I'd ditch.

The one thing that never really worked in my brain was having multiple layers and a dedicated layer up/down key. I tend to store keys on things where I'd normally hold instead. For instance, my shift keys also hold ( and ) when I tap instead of hold. Same with control and alt. The only layer that I really use would be similar to that raise key, to turn my top row into F keys.

I really wish there was a somewhat affordable way to get good legends on keys that represent this information. I still have to take a beat to remember what | is on my keyboard every time I need it.

I'd highly recommend at least giving a smaller keyboard a go though. The kits that I've seen are fantastic if you want some hands-on tinkering, but also the prebuilt stuff is slick too. I had zero soldering experience going into it, and now it's turned into not just learning about how to use a soldering iron, but also 3D printing, as I wanted to test out a bunch of different keyboard shapes and that was a low-cost way of experimenting.

I like to be able to sit down at any computer and keyboard and be fully productive right away.

thanks, me too. the one big disadvantage here, if you have to go into an office, is either having to own multiple or transporting your keyboard back and forth every day.

there was a period where i was doing standard + ortho Plank + an ErgoDox-like on three different machines and it's a bit of a mindfuck context switching between them. extremely inefficient.

For anyone out of the loop: Size/key count is the new(ish?) metric which perhaps most accurately categorizes the keyboard hobby. E.g. if you look at reddit's r/MechanicalKeyboards, they're mostly <80% layout.

If anyone is looking into ergonomic keyboards, look into a layout other than Qwerty as well. I swapped to the Corne and Colemak-DH at the same time a few years ago. The Corne is beautiful, but I would say swapping to Colemak-DH provided much more ergonomic benefit for me.

I love my Corne but I never use it any more because I have to switch to my laptop keyboard too often. I am still able to use an ergo keyboard layout on both, so even when I can't use an ergo keyboard, it is still very comfortable to type.

They look fantastic but I am on the opposite end. The kinesys 360 pro I use now made me enjoy keyboards a bit more. I love all the extra buttons and tbh, would like even some more. Feels like a spaceship.

Although not very small, HHKB is my workhorse.

I switched from a typical keyboard to a 75% Keychron K2 HE (https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k2-he-wireless-ma...) and I like it a lot. I wasn't using the side keys enough for the desk real estate required so this is more efficient. However as a result it's hard to go smaller; I like the function keys!

There's also a few notes on how reducing the actuation distance using the magnetic switches is a decent productitiy/RSI-reducer but that's a subject for another thread.

mee too