Why I Like Small Keyboards

I use my keyboards a lot, my job as a software engineer involves quite a lot of typing, I also spend quite a lot of my spare time in front of a computer. I’ve been daily driving small keyboards for a while and have been enjoying doing so. Here’s a bit about which keyboards and why I like them. I built my first keyboard in 2014, a 44 key Atreus. I used my school’s laser cutter to cut sheets of clear acrylic for the case, hand-wired all the keys and diodes to a microcontroller board, and made liberal use of a hot glue gun. I spent a good while learning the layout, which was made more difficult by the blank key caps I’d chosen – mostly because they were the cheapest available. I kept using it for a while but would increasingly switch back to a more standard 60%1 board, I was playing a lot of DotA at the time which was tricky with the smaller keyboard, until the Atreus just stayed in the drawer. In 2020 I found out about the Corne keyboard, a 42 key split keyboard. I also got my first…