Angel (2021)

Hand wired QMK is almost ready. qmk/qmk_firmware#11501

A symmetric staggered ergonomic keyboard.

Idea

A slightly ergonomic keyboard that fits into 60% form factor.

Featuring

• Staggered yet ergonmic

• Maximize hand distance

• Arrow keys are must.

• Fitts' law is respected. Four corner keys are maximized while [you shall no call its name] is break into 3 keys. The gaint space bar is a huge waste ot thumb(s). It breaks into 1.25, 1.5, 1.25 to free it up. My favorite combination is, backspace, enter, whitespace.

• 60% form factor which should fix your notebook perfectly.

• all keys are under 1.75u which means no stablizer is required. Period.

Cons

It's incompatible to traditioal keycaps layout. CAPS LOCK is the only 1.75u key on traditional keyboard. In Symmetric 60%, 4 is required but you can always swap into smaller keycaps at your wish.

Prior work

in the order of first appearance.

Symmetric Stagger 60% by Jesse Vincent, Keyboardio While I wait for the Model 01 boards to come back from Shenzhen, I've been messing around with a symmetric stagger 60% layout. Before I go and get 5 PCBs made, I'd love layout feedback from folks.

Meti

SemiErgo by meti (March 2017) I will vote it for ANSI standard without any doubt.

Symmetric 70 hand-wire (2020)

Rominronin

Katana 60 (Nov, 2017). it's a beauty. ps. the character in the middle is 刀 which means sword in Chinese and Japanese.

Tsuka60 - the Katana60 v2 PCB interest check (2019)

Candykeys (2020)

Next

Now I am going to handwire one to refuse my point. Stay tune.

You can try it on paper and let me know how to you think about Symmetric60.

References

On space bar http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_problems.html

Key symbols from http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_computing_symbols.html

Mac keyboard shortcuts https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Human Engineering the Keyboard by K. H. Eberhard Kroemer Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 1972 14: 51 DOI: 10.1177/001872087201400110

Prototyping Tips

Kicad

• Hardware acceleration will eeschema freezes, so don't enable it. Reset settings by rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/kicad or verisioning it.
• Plot gerber files and drills based on JCLPCB's tutorial. Suggested naming patterns

Special thanks to Haway 梁, Jeff 邱, Justin 吳.