I’m settling in to typing full time with the Keyboardio, and as I’m loosening up getting more fluid with it, I am hitting ENTER a lot while missing H.
Since H is a much more common key than '/", and many of my keystrokes are aimed at various instant messaging clients, and my typing speed has had a recent sharp decline, my friends are starting to notice and comment. It’s just a matter of time before I really biff something.
Are other folks finding this same typo? any other funny adjustments?
Yep, that’s my worst typo too!
Coming from Kinesis, Enter is the strangest location in the default keymap. Kinesis says it should be a giant key under my thumb. Keyboardio says it should be an awkward stretch for my index. Odd.
I rearranged it a couple different ways and ultimately put it back. It’s working for me so long as I keep my keyboard split and the halves angled a little so that my wrist is aligned along the diagonal from the outside bottom corner to the inside top corner of each half.
The reasoning behind the change relative to a ‘regular’ keyboard is the same as many of the other layout changes behind the Model 01 – that your pinkies aren’t strong and dextrous. We did make a different choice than Kinesis about where many keys should land. I’ve never been a fan of the Kinesis’ default layout and I’m sure that impacted the design decisions.
Everything under your thumb is ‘special’ in our worldview, in that it’s either hit with a very high frequency or often used chorded. I don’t have key frequency charts in front of me at the moment, but, IIRC Enter’s frequency doesn’t rate high enough to end up there.
All that being said, “Fn-Space” also generates Enter and might be a comfortable way for you to get there.
Keyboard layouts are (or ought to be) a very personal thing. Everyone’s hands are different and years of training on one layout is definitely going to impact how you feel about others. Remapping the Model 01 to suit your brain and your hands is something we encourage, but we wouldn’t be sad if you gave the default layout a bit of time to see if you get comfortable with it.
[Also, while we’ve spent years crafting our layout and design, this is our first commercially produced keyboard and we might just be wrong 
]
All that being said, “Fn-Space” also generates Enter and might be a comfortable way for you to get there.
Ooh, I totally missed that.
I’m considering swapping Fn with shift but this makes leaving it where it is tempting!
I guess for me the nice thing about the Kinesis enter location is that not only is it big and easy, it’s also a really “separate” location that’s hard for me to hit by accident just because my hands are a bit offset. Since Enter often does something tough to undo, keeping it somewhere hard to confuse is nice.
I’m sure I’ll get used to whatever layouts I have soon enough… I need to just remind myself how long it took me to get used to my Kinesis. And then I’ll be buying that second one for the office 
Understood. We bumped up the interior edge on Tab and Enter, but if we ever do another rev of the keycaps, we may look at bumping it up further.
Personally, I find reaching my index finger laterally across one key to be harder than accomplishing the same with my pinky (hopefully that makes sense). The former requires me to shift my wrist and hand, while the latter requires me only to shift my hand. But, as noticed, everyone is different.
I’ll admit that I was initially disappointed with some of the layout decisions of the Model 01, but I’ve come to think a lot of that is simply because I came over from a Kinesis. The layouts are just similar enough to cause problems, whereas coming from a traditional keyboard may have ironically introduced less friction. What seemed to be somewhat haphazard now feels like there was a lot of thought behind it, and the changes I’ve made (such as swapping Space and Backspace) have surfaced unanticipated problems I wouldn’t be experiencing had I left them untouched.
I’m more and more tempted to revert back to the stock firmware to give the default layout an honest try.
Interesting. That’s one change I wouldn’t expect to cause problems. CAn you tell us more about it?
The BUTTERFLY key profile makes it harder to mis-key than the ENTER key. It sort of swoops away from the N more. I tried that as a key placement for ENTER, but found I had already adapted enough that I prefered to accept some accidents rather than re-learn where ENTER is, just as I’m getting close to my old keyboard speed.
If I were learning fresh, I would swap ENTER to BUTTERFLY.
FWIW I’ve mapped BACKSPACE onto BUTTERFLY.
I was surprised, too. One is a Mac issue; the other is a muscle memory issue.
On the Mac, Alt+Backspace deletes a word. By swapping Space and Backspace, Alt and Backspace are now on the same side, making it harder to delete entire words at a time. Windows doesn’t have this problem, because the same function is Ctrl+Backspace.
The muscle memory issue is from my being left-handed and exclusively using the left-handed chording keys (plus Space) on every keyboard since forever. The problem I’ve experienced is the interaction with Shift and Space on short words, such as “I”. Muscle memory compels me to use the left-side version of shift, and since Space is also on the left, that combination slows me down quite a bit in certain scenarios. Like I said, it’s purely a personal issue (exacerbated by the fact that I got rid of right shift in favor of Enter).
I managed to break myself of that habit in a surprisingly short amount of time (like, hours) by using this KeyRemap4Macbook trick to make shift keys only work when using the “correct” ones (e.g. so left shift & a does nothing, but right shift + a works normally).
Well that’s the part I was complaining about about how it’s hard to reach because it feels like something is in the way. There’s no pleasing me!
Look at the OneShot plugin. Search it up here for a lot of conversation, and circle back with any questions. OneShot modifiers have made a huge difference for me. Also swap around your thumb keys. You can pull the keycaps and make them match however you choose to lay them out.
That’s kind of fascinting. I’ll give it a look. Thanks.
I’ll take a look. Thanks. I know I can (and have taken advantage of) remap keys, but I’m leaning toward going back to stock at the moment (save for the two macros I’ve programmed).
I plan to stick with the stock layout initially before I start moving things around. I will enable one-shot modifiers though.
OneShots are life changers for me. I need to figure out how to get them working on my MacBook’s built in keyboard. I never want to chord again.
Oh, I think I figured it out. While the H key is in the same place with respect to the home position as on Kinesis, I think my muscle memory had bound H to “the farthest key I hit to the left with my index finger”. Damn you muscles…
I totally agree about OneShot, so far at least! With the LED effect for showing active keys.
Coming from a Kinesis Advantage, I experienced an epiphany moment where my hand posture changed from feeling focused on my thumbs to feeling focused on my first fingers. Using tab and enter in the default positions eventually led to a feeling like my hands should hover based on my index fingers rather than hovering based on my thumbs, and it felt good once I adjusted. For whatever that’s worth as a data point.
I think the default position of Enter, Tab and Escape is a good design choice, particularly for new users who are coming to the model01 from a standard keyboard and not via Kinesis or similar. Personally, I have become used to having return under my thumb and I probably will remap it to match - especially since I don’t intend to give away my kineses (kinesiseseseses?) any time soon. I’ll probably leave Tab and Escape where they are. I map them to the left thumb cluster on Kinesis but there aren’t enough thumb keys for everything on the model01, and the left inner column is reasonably intuitive.