Felix Kühling explains how hexagonal keys work surprisingly well in an ergonomic layout without fine-tuning parameters like hand rotation, column stagger and splay.

kbd.news is running their Advent Calendar for the second year and I’m honoured they chose my article about Mantis and hexagonal keys in ergo keyboards for opening it. Enjoy the read and have a happy holiday season …

  • humanplayer2@lemmy.ml
    0·
    7 months ago

    A very interesting read, and really cool looking! I’d really like to try the keycaps in v. 0.3!

    I’m curious about this point:

    With square keys, each key has eight neighbours, but the diagonal neighbours are about 1.4 times further away than orthogonal ones and therefore harder to reach for the same finger.

    Say I arrange square keys in columns with a 0.5u offset. Then each key also only has six neighbors. I wonder how that compares distance-wide to hexagonal keys.

    Edit: the Klacker BS does this, but offsets the rows instead.