I am in love with the IDEA of the Atreus, alas, I am not a fully 10-finger-blind-typist, and a German on top of that, so I have a hard time getting anything useful out of the Atreus for the time being.
Something that would help me tremendously would be keycaps that actually show which character is being typed - i.e. German layout keycaps fitting onto the Atreus.
The ones shipped with Atreus are English - nope, confusing. German layout ;,:.-_ keys are printed differently. And no umlauts (sigh).
So I’ve been looking for keycap sets, but most are meant to replace regular keyboards.
Also, there is no chance I could customize the layout for the Atreus and get keycaps which show exactly this - which leads me to:
Custom printed/etched keycaps. Now, is there a way to make those? The cheapest way would be to print labels and stick them on the keys. Not pretty, but could work. There are, however, no premade label sets for keycaps, I guess…
Search for ortholinear keycap sets that offer extras for Nordic-German languages (they go for NorDe sometimes). Any ortholinear set should work, but you can also preferably pick a set with a uniform keycap profile (keycaps that are all in the same shape) so that you can arrange them however you like, since some of the keys must go to unorthodox places due to the unique layout of the Atreus.
Another option is to learn touch typing, so that you don’t ever need to look at your keyboard (other than to admire it I guess). My native language is Turkish, and it is almost impossible to find a keycap set with a Turkish layout, but I can type easily in Turkish because my fingers now where all the keys are located. Plus, the idea of small keyboards kind of breaks down if you do not know how to touch type, because the smaller the layout is, the more keys you start to move to the secondary layers, where the legends on the keycaps won’t be of use.
Well, not much to say more than above, but printing your keymaps (or using the laminated card with your configuration) is way better than trying to hunt the symbols on the keyboard, because to do so, you need to move your hands and to look away from your screen…
The Linear-A keycaps save me from seeking letters on my ModelO1, and helped a lot for the transition to an other layout
So you suggest typing/practicing with a printed layout sheet instead of custom keycaps?
I tried to find the suggested keycaps on Amazon, but there was basically nothing, at least not in black with German keys.
Is there no shop that prints custom keycaps? I found some totally exotic keycaps, but I am not looking for alien signs or Simpsons characters as keys… (lol)
This will be a late reply but you can check WASD keyboards for custom printed keycaps. They also offer ready to ship keycaps as far as I know, you can also check those. There was also a recent Reddit post about custom printed keycaps, but I couldn’t find the link for that.
I just wish Keyboardio would offer additional keycap sets other than Linear A. I cannot seem to find black PBT keycaps with XDA profile elsewhere.
