Daily driving 42 keys keyboard

2024-01-26

So I was bored, trying to type on my laptop’s weirdly placed keyboard while lying on the bed and had a light bulb moment, "split mechanical keyboards is all I need!".

Cantor

This was June 2022, while I always wanted to get a mechanical keyboard (because they looked cool!) and was aware of the split (ergo) mech keebs, I was not sure if they’re even practical for everyday uses. They looked weird & tacky, and most of the keebs I came across (mostly on /r/ErgoMechKeyboards) lacked labels on the keys, "How’re you supposed to know which key is which?".

Well, I really wanted to get a split ergo mech keeb now so that I can lie down on the bed and type normally and against my better judgement, I bought Cantor by Diego Palacios aka diepala from beekeeb. After receiving Cantor, which was stuck in the customs for a month or so, it took me some 6 months to get used to typing, which included learning touch typing and getting used to typing on a split keeb. While the learning both at the same time was kinda irritating, keybr.com made learning less terrible and later monkeytype.com to improve the typing speed.

Configuring Cantor & Layers

Configuring Cantor took some 14 (and maybe still ongoing) iterations, like initially I had layer 1 key on the left side and the num pad on left as well, which made typing numbers pain in the ass hand.

base

So the base layer is the generic QWERTY layout with symbols common on a traditional keyboard.

num layer

The numbers layer contains the function keys and num pad. It was quite late when I realized that the num pad was inverted, while it doesn’t matter much, I would’ve preferred num pad bottom to top rather than top to bottom.

symbol layer

Since most of the symbols get covered in the Numbers layers, the remaining and the arrow keys are placed in the symbols layer, with the curly braces (for jumping between paragraphs in vim), backslash, tilde the most used. There’s another layer, but it contains some audio/brightness controls and is not that interesting.

Everyday Uses

Since I use Vim or Vim’s keybindings in Rider/VSCode/Visual Studio, navigating files were a lot easier and also made me ditch the arrow keys in favour of hjkl (though I rarely use hl for horizontal movement and prefer f or F to jump directly to the character). Regardless, it still took some time to get used to the keyboard as daily driver and retain the same typing speed, especially when using some symbols, as they were many and difficult to remember which symbol was where and on which layer. Funny enough, even after using Cantor every day for almost a year, I still sometimes get confused between layers when trying to type a symbol, only sometimes.