The wireless requirement will probably be the most annoying, as you'll have to deal with batteries, charging, figuring out how to get the two halves to communicate with each other and/or register as separate devices, etc. But it's certainly possible.
Believe it or not, there are folks out there creating their own curved keyboards. See the following for an example.
https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard
In How I built a keyboard by handadereth
dactyl-keyboard
OpenSCAD2016–2025
adereth / dactyl-keyboard
dactyl-keyboard
Parameterized ergonomic keyboard
22Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Parameterized ergonomic keyboard
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- abstracthat/dactyl-manuform · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:02:44 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year25 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-02-26 22:32:27 UTC to 2025-01-03 13:00:27 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
The Dactyl Keyboard
The Dactyl is a parameterized, split-hand, concave, columnar, ergonomic keyboard.
There's a talk about the motivation and design of the Dactyl that helps provide context for this repo:
Assembly
Generating a Design
Setting up the Clojure environment
Install the Clojure runtime
Install the Leiningen project manager
Install OpenSCAD
Generating the design
Run lein repl
Load the file (load-file "src/dactyl_keyboard/dactyl.clj")
This will regenerate the things/*.scad files
Use OpenSCAD to open a .scad file.
Make changes to design, repeat load-file, OpenSCAD will watch for changes and rerender.
When done, use OpenSCAD to export STL files
Tips
Some other ways to evaluate the clojure design file
Example designing with clojure
Printing
Pregenerated STL files are available in the things/ directory.
Wiring
Masks for the flexible PCBs I used are available for the left and right side.
A very rough guide for the brave is here - It will be improved over time (TODO)!
License
Copyright © 2015 Matthew Adereth
The source code for generating the models (everything excluding the things/ and resources/ directories is distributed under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3. The generated models and PCB designs are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License Version 4.0.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesThanks for the mention! For anyone interested, all the source and models for the Dactyl keyboard are available here: https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard
There's also a talk I gave a Clojure/conj about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4
In How I built a keyboard by handYou could always 3D print your own one...
https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard
Bonus points for having used Clojure to design it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4
In Kinesis Advantage 2Here's my Wes Clark story...
About 6 years ago I went to his Brooklyn apartment for his birthday. I had never heard of him, but he's distant cousins with my wife's step father and we lived nearby. We get to his apartment and I start looking at the book collection... a lot of interesting math and computer science.
I started talking with him 1 on 1 and at some point he drops that he created the first personal computer. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the back of my mind I was thinking "oh boy, this guy's not all there." But then he took me to his office and there's a poster of him with the LINC and I'm realizing that I've hit the motherlode of awesome computing history from a primary source.
He then showed me his current project: a working model Broadway stage for his granddaughter. It had to-scale working versions of everything, inclu
Read the rest
ding the lights and actual mechanisms for drawing the curtains. Then he fired up his Mac with a 30" monitor and showed me that every piece had been laser cut from schematics that he had designed. In raw postscript. The entire thing was programmatically generated from a massive postscript program that was fully parameterized so he could change the dimensions of anything single component and the whole stage would be regenerated.
That programmatic modeling project was a big motivation for the work I've been doing to make parameterized 3d models for ergonomic keyboards (https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard).
I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old flying around vim editing postscript. It was a trip and it was really inspiring to see someone his age still hacking.