My journey into the world of DIY Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboards began when my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 started to fail. That has a very slight curve to the alphabet block's rows, which became more pronounced in later designs like the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard (see Wikipedia). However, these all have the traditional row stagger which gives the right hand comfortable (diagonal) columns of keys per finger, but not the left.
In the DIY mechanical keyboard world column based layouts and orthonormal are popular (keys in a grid), but there is another solution which at first glance preserves the traditional row stagger: The symmetric katana stagger, originally popularised by Baris Tosun aka RominRonin's Kanata keyboards as early as 2015. Well, what if you combined that with a curve to each row?
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| This looks like a row stagger, but there are well defined columns for each finger! |
