YellowAfterlife

Cheers!

Thank you!

I'm guessing that you have -_ key in top-right, =+ where [{ would normally be, and three of the arrows on the thumb row? I toyed with having 4 arrows on the thumb row for a bit and currently checking on having a navigation toggle layer that only swaps the letter keys on the right half.

If you are comfortable with building your own, there's a good number of keyboards in this form factor - I made a list recently. There are similar-shaped keyboards with a slightly different key distribution like Egg58 or Cantaloupe, keyboards with slightly more keys like Redox and other ErgoDox derivatives, keyboards with asymmetrical clusters on the right like Breeze or ErgoNICE, 4x7 keyboards like Ergoinu, Interphase, or Kapl, and even a 4x8 Drift...

I've seen that there was a tiny trackball mod for Sofle, but cannot easily tell if any changes are necessary to get this working with Choc.

Myself I'd probably want a bigger trackball like fingerpunch's Faux Fox / Rock On builds have it.

It's certainly not wood or steel, but it's doing okay - the only time when you can feel that it's not an extra-sturdy material is when pressing on the encoders, and that might be addressable by adding an extra pair of rubber feet next to these.

I ended up getting a Sofle since it turns out that a few people assemble these locally, and I have noticed a very certain caveat about these little keyboards: the Latin alphabet fits well on the default layer, but my native tongue doesn't - ї is usually made by pressing the key that makes ] on the US layout, but that key is now beyond the right edge of the keyboard. Perhaps I'll get a custom one (with an extra column of keys on each side) made later if I don't figure out a keymap that makes sense.

Thank you for your advice, and also Sofle looks neat - for a 58-key keyboard it doesn't feel like it has sacrificed too much.

Ximi looks amusing - I guess this is the point where you need 3-4 layers to make proper use of it, but two trackballs are quite a treat. I do occasionally use a trackball as a scroll ~~wheel~~ ball in my existing setup.

That's a neat keyboard - doesn't have arrow keys, but their upcoming Defy keyboard has a rather impressive number of side keys and thumb keys. I'll keep this in mind.

So what do people do with thumb clusters?

In my current setup, I have a little tool to have remapped RAlt act as a faux mod layer (so that I can quickly enter symbols like · — ➜ or have two-key shortcuts that don't conflict with anything), but most of the objective improvement comes from good auto-completion, snippets, and editor features (e.g. multi-cursors can be a blessing to both edit a bunch of lines at once and to create N constructs out of a list of names/signatures).

I've seen this one, but I'd need to find a local sample to verify that I can use it - per post, I have non-too-strict typing habits and I'm afraid that an ortholinear[-ish] layout will be weeks-long despair with me missing keys.

For example, I already had a habit of holding my hands at an angle prior to using split keyboards, but this also meant that I was usually pressing Y key with my left index finger, which, on Sculpt, meant that I was now either typing a T or hitting my finger on the edge of the keyboard.

Thank you - I've been eyeing the various keeb.io models (Cepstrum / Quefrency / Sinc / KBO-5000), and is there more to be aware of beyond layout? Off-hand I can only tell that switches are hotswappable on all of these except KBO-5000, and that Quefrency / Sinc have an option for 3x1.25u / 2.25u / 1.25u on the bottom left row, which is nice.

And as for the squishies, that's a delight