Presented by Mattia Dal Ben (Eurotech) at EclipseCon 2022.
In this session I'll focus on various aspect of modern keyboards and their outdated design and walk through the improvements the open source community brought to this field.
Hardware: Physical layout and how to improve on a design that dates back to the 19th century. Columnar stagger, split keyboards, thumb clusters and splay will be the keywords for this section.
Software: How the open source keyboard firmwares changed how we use the keyboard. I'll talk about advanced firmware features like layers, mod-taps, caps word and combos.
Layout: Functional layout and how the QWERTY layout was designed to slow you down (really!). I'll talk about modern alternatives like Dvorak, Colemak-DHm and Miryoku which leverages the more advanced features of modern firmwares.
Finally I'll put everything together and talk about my current daily driver: a 34-keys bluetooth split keyboard powered by the open source ZMK firmware and the Miryoku layout.