Built a Keyboard

1. 2015-11-15 at 11:51 AM UTC

   #1
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
   solder work took ages.
   
   60% format, aluminium guide plate, brown gateron (cherry clone) switches, PCB/ATMEL processor by GON
   
   will add more detail later, have some photos though
   
   ***PS. still waiting on back cover to arrive so it's currently just sitting on a mouse pad
   
   
   
   
2. 2015-11-15 at 11:52 AM UTC

   #2
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
   
   
   
   
   
   image limit
3. 2015-11-15 at 9:11 PM UTC

   #3
   

   Lanny Bird of Courage
   Nice. How do you get by on a 60% though? Navigation cluster is useless sure and I use my function keys pretty heavily although I can see how people could not care but lack of the arrow keys seems like it would be tough to work with. Like sure, you could probably drive an editor and custom shell without them but it seems like anything with text entry other than specialized tools (things like browsers, utility stuff, the shell on every machine you ssh into) is going to lean on them pretty heavily. Do you have some macro magic or does it really just not come up?
4. 2015-11-16 at 12:07 AM UTC

   #4
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
   most people who use 80/60/40 keyboards have multiple 'layers' mapped, so you can access different layouts by holding the function keys
   
   
   the way I have it set up is where a normal keyboard has the caps-lock key, I have Fn1 - to turn on caps I hold Fn1 and hit tab; to use arrow keys I hold Fn1 and use a virtual directional pad with 'P' as the up key:
   
   
   
   takes a little getting used to especially with blank keycaps, is pretty efficient once you're used to it.