I think it depends on what you're looking for. The Lily58, Iris, Corne, Aurora, and all other 40% boards I can think of have the thumb keys right up under the bottom row, which isn't comfortable for me. Of course the Moonlander and Voyager aren't 40% layouts, but I don't use all the keys. But if thumb key placement isn't a dealbreaker, those are excellent options!
For prebuilt, definitely an Iris keyboard without including switches and omitting the middle plate. If you’re fine going smaller then I recommend a prebuilt piantor which is similar to a corne but has a more aggressive pinky stagger. I very much recommend the Iris however since it’s the sleekest and well designed for its price with integrated rp2040 MCU making it feel “premium” compared to others in its pricerange with the pcb and mcu exposed in some manner.
The downsides to it are that it is not wireless, and it has too many keys for me. If you keep everything on within one row from the Home row, you really only need like 36 keys.
Otherwise, I think it’s a great keyboard, even though it is expensive. 
While ZSA won't be selling these keycaps on their own, the work we did to help Tai-Hao refine this new keycap profile is not proprietary. We wanted to push forward Choc keycaps as a whole, not just for us.
Ugh… now I’m even more tempted to buy one of those. On a related note, those caps are really nice, but I’ve got to ask about the pink balls on them. Are those balls actually part of the cap, or is that something you added after the fact? I’m sure that’s probably great to help with indexing and I’m kind of tempted to try it myself.
The pink dots are stickers, and if "indexing" means "I need these so I can keep track of which row I'm touching", then yep, that's what they're for. 😁 I can keep track of where my fingers are with only three rows, but with only two thumb keys I couldn't just remove the top row like I used to do on the Moonlander. I actually like this even better, and I'm going to put the stickers on the Moonlander, too. They're often called "gem stickers" or "jewel stickers" in shops.
Yep, indexing is to make it easier to make sure your fingers are in the right spot. Most keycap sets will include indexed versions of F and J for QWERTY layouts, although you can usually also buy additional indexed keys (such as T and N) for other layouts. The traditional indexed keys help with horizontal alignment while the traditional row stagger helps with vertical alignment. However with columnar stagger like most split ergo keyboards use I actually find vertical alignment to be the bigger issue most times since all the rows “feel” the same. Having some bumps on the top row would help with the vertical alignment I think.
Looking at the options though I’m not terribly thrilled with the colors/design/looks of most of the ones I’m finding. I think you found the perfect ones for your caps and it just all looks so clean (the alignment of those stickers on the keys is just chefs kiss perfect, well done). Unfortunately if I picked up a voyager I was thinking about replacing the caps with the MBK Legend keycaps and I’m having trouble finding anything that would look anywhere near as nice as your setup with those.
Aha! Yes, the stickers are working very well for that so far. Sorry you couldn’t find anything to work for your keycaps! Oh, you could also try looking for nail art crystals. They’re often pretty tiny, so maybe more likely to fit a wider variety of keycaps.
You’re not wrong. It’s what started me on the mech kb journey so long ago. I wish I remembered what pen it was, but it was my teacher’s and had a very satisfying click to it. He said that it was the same click as the old mainframe keebs that he used to work on. I was young, and had no idea what he was talking about, but a keyboard can sound and feel that good? I had to know! Fast forward to today, that dragon has not yet been reached, but the chase continues on both fronts (pen and kb).
You could have done far worse with both. Pilor and Pentel are great. You could have bought Visconti limited edition which fail to work out of the factory, horror of horrors. Pilot is reliable little worker and won’t fail you. Great bang for buck.
True! In fact the Pentel pencil saw me through both undergrad and grad school (in math, so quite a lot of hand-writing of stuff). It's basically family now.
Indeed. I got my brother both of those, although I got Pilot MR Gold, not retro. But still. Great pens. Work reliably for awesome price. Fountain pen is a bit of a nail for my liking (Pelikan user here)… but you can’t argue quality and reliability. Only character.
I don’t know anything about mech keyboards, but this showed up on my front page and it looks so cool. I have no use for one but I sort of want one now lol
Be warned! That’s how they get you… pretty flashy things that cost waaaaay to much money. You tell yourself you couldn’t possibly justify spending that much on a keyboard. Maybe you’ll just try an entry level mechanical keyboard. But what case? What Switches? WHAT CAPS!?! You get a Keychron or something tons of people recommend and at first it’s amazing, unlike anything you’ve ever typed on. But then you see something NEW that has a feature you want to try or maybe a group buy Keycap set from your favorite franchise that just looks awesome (I’m looking at you Black speech of Mordor keycaps) ! The next thing you know you have an IKEA Billy bookcase displaying your collection and a $365 keeb is just another Tuesday.
What Impossibility Box said is 100% true. But also I only got into keyboards because I had wrist pain, and the Moonlander took my pain away. And then I got swept up into the hobby. 😁
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