In picture

I think it would be unfair to do this kind of post without showing the keyboard

Keyboard: Sofle Choc by splitted.space.
They’re making Cooler Sofles these days.

Switches: 35gf Ambient Twilights

Keycaps: 57x MBK Convex POM, 1x wrk. Dime (for the Gui key!)

Legs: “Slim laptop kickstand” by Baseus

Macro pad: UwU by Wooting
Sometimes you can find these for cheap when people discover that switch actuation point was not the only thing stopping them from being good at osu! / etc.

Mouse: Razer Naga X
A slightly excessive number of side buttons requires the so-called MMO mice to have a somewhat ergonomic profile.

Mostly out of frame: Kensington Orbit
Here for the “scroll ring” or giving the cursor small nudges.

Default layer

I’ve had the keyboard for slightly less than two years now so the layout has relatively stabilized.

Notes:

  • I have medium-sized hands and use a lightly claw-ish hand placement so all of the keys are accessible from the home row
  • Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in it so the alpha rows have to be mostly like this unless you’re willing to learn an alt. layout (as if I don’t have enough things to do)
  • Having a rotary encoder with Up/Down arrows next to an Enter key is very nice for navigating menus!
  • I press those Left/Right keys by curling fingers, not with a thumb
  • Having Delete as a tap on Alt is very nice when selecting things with a mouse!
  • Having -_ =+ on thumb is a little silly, but it’s nice for programming/markup.

Navigation layer

Notes:

  • I don’t like home-row mods, but I do like a home-row of mods on a navigation layer for wiggling lines of text/code around.
  • Having PrtScr and F4 above Alt is very nice on Windows/Linux!
  • Copy Word does Ctrl-Left, Ctrl-Shift-Right, Ctrl-C. This isn’t perfect (can’t select on word start), but still I get a lot of use out of this.
  • There are two AltGrs because I have a bunch of symbols (— · ➜ ≤≥ etc.) mapped through AHK on Windows and custom shortcuts on Linux.
  • “Search” opens voidtools Everything on Windows and FSearch on Linux - for quickly locating well-named files and directories.
  • The top-left key used to be Esc and I haven’t found anything else I’d like there.
  • TG N/2 toggles the following:

Nav block toggle layer

For playing games without re-mappable controls (or playing them without re-mapping anything).

Numpad and mirror layer

Enough to type numbers and small snippets of text without moving the right hand away from the mouse!

The numpad portion is mostly used to type phone numbers and 2FA codes.

The mouse

Evidently it’s mostly navigation keys and shortcuts that would take more work to access otherwise (e.g. are on the right half of the keyboard). Scroll Up/Down do 4 scroll “clicks” at a time.

Razer’s software isn’t The Best, but they do have application-specific profiles, which is good help for games with a large number of inputs.

You can also define one extra layer, but this mouse does not have any buttons that are convenient enough to press for that (e.g. G600 had a third “shift” button on top) so it’s mostly useless unless you have another Razer peripheral and the service is running.

Considerations

Hypothetically I could use another column for layout experiments (like offloading [ and | keys there and having an arrow key corner instead of a toggle layer), but there are rather few keyboards like this, less so pre-soldered and/or low-profile.

On other hand, the smallest keyboard I could use for anything would likely be 6x3+3, though I don’t see myself needing one unless PG1316S boards become common enough for vendors to sell pre-built options.

Thanks for reading !