atreus

I used to think being able to touch type on any surface would be really cool, but after some experience with the nightmare that is typing on a touch-screen mobile, I'm convinced it would just be frustrating. What makes typing satisfying (and accurate) is the feedback you get when a switch has actuated; otherwise you must be much more hesitant with your keystrokes. FWIW I had the same objection to a fancy stationary keyboard as you, so I ended up designing and building my own tiny travel keyboard: https://github.com/technomancy/atreus

One cool thing about the new version is that it uses s-expressions for its file format. I was disappointed to find that I couldn't perform rotation on a group of footprints at once, but once I took a look at the file format I found it was easy to load into Racket, do a little trig, and spit out the rotated forms: https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt...

I actually taught myself an "optimized" keyboard layout called QGMLWY[1] and got up to my normal typing speed. I had to go back to qwerty though because it was too much overhead to get the layout on every device I use. I definitely noticed an improvement in ergonomics. My current project is building an Atreus keyboard[2] which will have the QGMLWY layout in hardware, hopefully bypassing all the compatibility issues. [1] http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization [2] https://github.com/technomancy/atreus

I've gotten several pull requests to my free hardware design that I sell as my primary source of income. Granted, a PCB change is difficult to test given the minimum order quantity, but other physical designs like cases are easy to do a one-off if you have access to a laser cutter or 3D printer. https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/pull/4 https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/pull/10 https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/pull/15 As someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments, RMS thinks on a much longer time scale than you and I. Prototyping PCBs is already dramatically easier than it was ten years ago; I'm convinced the cost and MOQ will only continue to drop.

you can grab a full kit here: http://atreus.technomancy.us/ but it's pretty easy to source the parts, see https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/ (which also has links to build instructions)