My intrests in custom keyboards

I believe my gravitation towards customised keyboards came about due to some of the following factors provided in this section.

Typing classes

During my teenage years, I used to go for typing classes on actual typewriters. That’s because, the first personal computers like the Apple ][ were just being made available for consumers to buy. I went for typing classes every Saturday for about 2 or 3 years, which allowed me to reach a typing speed of about 60+ word per minute.

Piano lessons

I started playing the piano when I was in kindergarten. I enjoyed the first few grades, but after grade 3, it required daily piano practise sessions which wasn’t my thing. But even then, playing the piano certainly helped with my finger dexterity - being able to press multiple keys at the same time, with some keys being far from each other.

Computer Keyboards

The full 104 key keyboard

During my teenage years with the early IBM compatible PCs like the 80286 and 80386, we only had the full 104 keyboard and wired mouse to work with. I love the clickyness of the original IBM XT keyboard. The other thing that I loved was the numeric keypad, especially the vertical enter key on the right most part of the keyboard. So, when my right hand was on the mouse and away from the keyboard home keys, it was easy to extend my thumb and press that enter key.

This convenience heavily influenced me moving to 60% keyboards with the right most key being the enter key. Not only that, my preference was for the European ISO key on these 60% keyboards because it had more vertical real estate compared to the US ANSI Enter key.

Laptop function keys

Most of my working life, I’ve been using the laptop, some of which like the HP and Dell had a Fn(Function) key which allowed you to use some of the existing keys much like a numeric keypad. And this got me thinking a lot about how I could extend the Fn key to other parts of the keyboard for things like navigation such as Left, Right, Home and End.

This was before I got into mechanical keyboards or even knew that we could program them. The reason behind that was because I used laptops and having an external keyboard out of the question for me as I did some busines travels. Having a seperate keyboard would just make my travels more cumbersome. Besides this, I didn’t realise that you could get keyboards of smaller sizes compared to the full 104 keys.

If only there was a way to modify the laptop’s BIOS so that I could remap the keys. But, after some research, I just found it too difficult.

Other computer related influences

When I got my wife a MacBook, I learnt that there were OS wide short cut keys for the navigation keys. So, it got me thinking even more about remapping the keyboard especially at the OS level. This led me to finding out about AutoHotKeys, which allowed you to do shortcuts and remaps for the Windows OS. And I do use this in my current work at the bank to Maximize or Minize windows or move the mouse pointer to the center of the current active window with shortcut keys.

The other big influence was VIM, which I had to learn when I decided to take on my Kubernetes certification exam. So, believe it or not, I learnt VIM when I was about 50 years old! Now, at the bank, I use this every day for taking notes in Latex.

Starting out at the bank

This was my first introduction to mechanical keyboards.

When I started working at the bank in September of 2021, to make sure I had a good workflow going, especially with taking notes and typing, I started researching on mechanical keybaords. And before long, I stumbled upon the Vortex keyboards which allowed you to remap keys at the hardware level. It had a programming key which allowed you to create any remapping or macros without the need for any software installed on the OS.

The model I settled on was the 75% keyboard Racer 3 due to the following reasons:

• 1.25u sized ESC and Delete keys which I thought would be useful for VIM.

• Dedicated navigation keys which I required.

• Dedicated Function keys F1 to F12 which I also felt were important as I used the Alt-F4 key to close windows.

I just loved the fact that you could remap the keys so that I could have my navigation keys on the VIM like H, J, K, L keys when I pressed it with the function key. There was no going back now. This also influenced me to move away from laptops to a mini desktop PC, so that I could work on my virtual PC that the bank provided.

I got two of these Racer 3 keyboards - one for home and the other for work. But only the less popular silver switches and brown switches were available. But the remap of keys was too attractive that I bought them anyway. These keyboards introduced me to the world of mechanical keyboards and different compact layouts. And that just opened up my interest in mechanical keybaords and remapping their keys!