A Few Obscure Keyboard Switch Modifications
Figure 1: Oh yeah, I meant it when I said obscure... There’s no doubt that mechanical keyboard switches have gotten increasingly better in their stock forms over the past half decade of releases. Despite switches now having tighter manufacturing tolerances, smoother factory lubing, and overall higher quality per dollar spent, aftermarket modifications of switches is still one of the most discussed topics by people freshly joining the hobby today. This hyper fixation on switch modding is due in no small part to the glut of keyboard content creators that produced videos, shorts, and all manner of content during the peak of COVID talking about the art and science behind lubing and filming for switches. For a while there, it almost seemed as if you had to have some content about lubing, filming, and/or ‘frankenswitching’ switches if you wanted to cut it as being a true keyboard content creator in the space. However, as people like this have flooded the internet with...
Oct 22, 2024
- Don't believe anyone's numbers, especially if it comes to layout design.
- Whether QWERTY is good or bad depends entirely on your typing habits: physical layout, language/corpus, preferences.
- In the best case (0.2%), QWERTY was outperformed by only 2 random layouts out of 1000. (This suggests relying on random layouts in optimization models is absolutely inefficient.)
- In a worse scenario (50%+), every second random layout may outperform QWERTY. Relying on random layouts while looking for better alternatives may seem to be worth considering in this case.
- Well, not really. Random layouts may be better than QWERTY but usually not much better. It's next to impossible to find really good ones randomly in a pool of 2.65*10^32 or 5.23*10^44 alternatives.
- On the physical layout: both 60% QWERTY users and minimalistic split keymap wizards may be right. QWERTY on 60% is relatively better than QWERTY on 30-40%.
- Bonus: these principles are valid not just for QWERTY but any other layout.
All in all, now that we've made it clear why it makes sense to be sceptic and bother with custom layouts, in the upcoming articles of this series we will look into methods to find and design much better custom keymaps.Yep, one more thing. As I promised earlier: 520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 - this is the number of all the possible layouts for my 38-key layout (ignoring thumb keys).