Dialing Back the Crazy Just a Little (was: My God it's…)

[jpatters]

In the round 5 thread I posted this picture of (basically) my plans for the keycaps:

FULL OF KEYS.png (161.85 KiB) Viewed 1872 times

This will be a keyboard that I will build, probably in three pieces, with the arrow cluster and the numpad each as it's own piece.

But I got to thinking, what would I do if I could really go crazy with the legends?

FULL OF LEGENDS.PNG (76 KiB) Viewed 1872 times

This is inspired by the Space-Cadet Keyboard, of course, and has mostly the same symbols on the corresponding keys. The color scheme and layout are my own. I used keyboard-layout-editor.com, and would have done the layout of legends on each key differently if there was more flexibility there. And there would be hat keys, but those are (as far as I know) unsupported by the editor.

Thoughts?

[Muirium]

Thoughts? I want one! And a spare cap set in cuneiform.

(I'm only partly kidding. I love ancient writing systems!)

Your purely symbolic number row is a sterling idea and I'm definitely using it with my Round 5 caps. Speaking of which, 7bit has split the keys I'm after over two kits:

The minus and equals (or plus) live here instead:

Which would be fine if I weren't trying to do it in every colour!

[mr_a500]

But I got to thinking, what would I do if I could really go crazy with the legends?

"That's crazy!" I said while oogling my APL beam spring keyboard.

[jpatters]

Here is something, perhaps, a little more practical, although, having figured out how to render hat keys on keyboard-layout-editor.com, there are still quite a few keys that would require considerable tooling expense.

DIALING IT BACK A LITTLE.png (117.34 KiB) Viewed 1777 times

The main part, with alpha keys, would be a separate piece, with something like a Beagle Bone Black in it, so it would be a full personal computer. The accessory bits and the numpad would be optional, but I guess you would have to have a more standard number row if you were using it without the numpad. I will be building something very close, but without all of the crazy nonstandard caps (like my return key which would have to be tooled from scratch, not to mention the 1 and 1/12th width hat keys.)

[bhtooefr]

How are you changing the font on that editor, for what it's worth?

[jpatters]

In the profile/row field, type in SA. You can put SA R1, SA R2, and so forth, but they render the same. Use SA SPACE for the spacebar. SA and DSA actually render the same. I had to make very slight adjustment to a couple of key widths because they render with a slight gap on Safari.