eddie ~$

Planck keyboard, part 1

Building the Planck keyboard was easy but somewhat tedious; the tolerances on the plate in which the key switches mounts onto was tight so apart from the sore thumbs after fitting 48 switches in the plate it went quickly together.

After I placed the order at Drop.com I immidiately started to thinking about the keymap(s) and I decided to try the default one using US-INT keymap in order to be able to communicate using Swedish characters like ÅÄÖ. But it didn’t take long for me to realise that the frequence of Swedish characters used at work was way higher than I had anticipated, so I had to figure out how to make a custom keymap using the QMK firmware.

Making a custom keymap for the Planck (or any other QMK supported keyboard) was proven to be very easy. However making an optimal keymap layout is far from trivial and it will take some iterations to nail that. Since I like to keep my machines clean I spun up a VM (Debian stable) and then from there started to build a custom keymap, which was really easy by following the QMK documentation.

As a coder I like to have transactions on things, so I ended up on making a repo for holding all details on my keymap as well as resources found online (inspiration and what not). I also thought it would be fun to share these little notes that I take during the journey towards a good keymap for a swedish coder.

Ortholinear

From the very start it felt great to type on an ortholinear keyboard, even though the size was not something I was used to. The unecessary movement of fingers on an ordinary (staggered) keyboard became very clear and also very early on (talking minutes here!).


Tag(s):

planck, mechanicalkeyboard, ortholinear