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've been daily-driving a Planck with a custom layout for years now. I developed my own layout (QWERTY based but with punctuation and function keys on thumb-driven layers) and it took me a few weeks to get speed parity with my old 104 key, which was rough. But now I can't go back to a standard layout, it's just so much less hand movement that it feels so much better to type on. For gaming it's still a tossup, as most games expect you to have all the same keys in the same places. I've experimented with a "gaming" layer, but lacking a 5th row on the Planck still causes issues with some games.

It still baffles me that the standard layout isn't ortholinear after all these years. There's no reason for staggered rows other than path dependence. But when you have billions of people relying on years of muscle memory on the same layout, it's just not a tradeoff most people are willing to make.

I got a low profile ortho 40% called Technik from Boardsource: https://www.deskhero.ca/products/technik-by-boardsource-xyz

Unfortunately seems to have entirely disappeared from their website despite being a really lovely product that I've daily driven for years. If anyone finds a replacement I could recommend to friends I'd love to know about it.

They are nice but please also look into the atreus, it uses a column stagger and has least some angling for your wrists. It’s both a finished product and also a set of instruction for DIY. Otherwise r/ergoMechKeyboards has a plethora of unibody and split small keyboards

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