My weird little keyboard

If you look at your fingers, you will see that they aren't all slanted to the right and all the same size, that kind of hand would be the ideal for "normal" keyboards. Your fingers are all different sizes, and your hands are mirrored. My keyboard accounts for all of that with it's separate key "clusters" and every column beg the ideal size for my fingers. This staggering of the columns is called "columnar stagger" in the ergonomic keyboard world. There are also other approaches to take different finger lenghts into account, like "ortholinear stagger" (like in the Planck) or simply having each key column and row in a different height for each finger (like in the Kinesis Advantage, or the Dactyl), something I won't get into (although it might be a project for the future)

Also, while talking about hands and fingers, another aspect which my keyboard doesn't have, but it's ergonomically desirable is having a split design, where you can relax your back and type at shoulder width, and reducing ulnar deviation by being able to tent each half.

Your thumbs are your strongest digits, yet in a normal keyboard only one (or none if you don't touch type) thumb does the most ammount of work most of the time. My keyboard fixes that by giving each thumb two keys. They are now responsible for the most frequent special characters like Enter (Return), Backspace, Space and Esc (because of vim).

This is the base layer. It has all the letters and a few symbols. I access the modifiers via "home row mods", but I'll get into that later.

I use Colemak, again, because QWERTY doesn't have any good reason to keep existing.

I never really invested the time into being proefficient with the num pad, so I just adapted the number row into a layer. There's also the my most frequently used symbols, like the parens ()[]{}, and some symbols I use often because of the terminal, like -, | and *.

This is a thing that makes my layout radically different (and better) than standard keyboards, I can do tipical mouse movements without leaving the keyboard!

The directions are inspired from vim. In the homerow of the right hand it's the arrows, below it it's the mouse movement keys, and above there's the special navigations like Home and End. There's also mouse buttons and scroll wheel bindings in the left hand.

Here I just tossed the Function keys and some extra controls, like brightness, volume and resetting the keyboard. Here I also tossed the keys for changing the non-ascii input method between Linux (ibus) and Windows. More on that later.