This is something that’s been bugging me on a subconscious level for some time, and I’ve only recently recognized what it is and given it a voice. To quote Morpheus in the Matrix:
“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
When you’ve been stuck in the full-size keyboard matrix for long enough, you don’t know that there are other layouts, other possibilites. Eventually, when you’ve tried enough of those, you realize there’s a certain ineffable grail, a search for perfection. Taken to the extreme, this search for perfection is called by those in our hobby “endgame”. This pursuit may be a fool’s quest, and it is without a doubt different for everybody, but along the way we can learn some valuable lessons about the tools we use and our preferences and needs.
I’ll get to the point. Or rather, the center.
After having tried quite a few different layouts, I’ve come to realize that the ones I like the best position the hands on the home row in the center of the board, without too much of the board offset to the left or the right. Why, besides aesthetics? Ergonomics.
It feels like, along with the drive to minimize hand movement by putting less-used keys on layers, a common goal is to minimize the board’s overall size. Whether going from 100% down to 75 or 60 or 40%, the progression serves the same goal: freeing up desk space and allowing easier access to the mouse or pointing device.
When you consider the case of a full-size keyboard and right-handed user, the typical office and home use case, it is far from optimal due to the amount of hand movement to go from the home row to the mouse.
Look at that. It’s ABSURD.
Ideally the hands would be centered on the board in easy reach of the most used keys, and with minimal travel to the pointing device.
For me personally, I value form as much as function. Lately my quest has been for layouts where the home row keys are, quite literally, dead center. This is quite aesthetically pleasing.
One example of this is the 65XT layout. One super pretty example of this layout is the Zenith.
Note that the center of the board coincides with the center of the home row keys, between G and H.
This is not the only example. Our very own @Rico’s new Aquanaut is a southpaw layout that exhibits this characteristic (only missing the mark by 0.25u, but I’ll allow it).
Does this resonate for anybody else? Are there any other centrist layouts that you know of?
(I know this is a long wall of text, but I think we can all use more balance in our lives, and in our layouts.)
