Driver40
Driver40 is an ultraportable, 4x5 ortholinear, low profile split keyboard. Handful of words huh? Here’s what they mean:
- 4x5: The keyboard is built with a 4-row, 5-column key configuration.
- ortholinear: This means that the keys in the keyboard are not staggered, and instead aligned in a square grid.
- low profile: As you might’ve guessed, this means that the keyboard’s height is low, or in other words, it is a particularly slim keyboard.
- split: In contrast to a typical keyboard, which is one long rectangular slab with keys, a split keyboard is two slabs, interconnected with wires or through wireless signals.
Why?
I built a lily58 not very long ago, and I love it. It’s a 58-key, 4x6 column staggered split keyboard.
It’s really comfortable to type on for long periods of time, and I found the way it uses layers to “hide” keys that are barely used but still necessary to keep at hand much more practical than having a big keyboard with keys for all kinds of functions.
As a student, I spend most of my time away from my desk: sometimes I’m on campus, other times I’m at a coffee shop, maybe I’m at a friend’s, or at the library—and unfortunately, the homework doesn’t stop flowing. Thanks to this I pretty much always carry my school backpack with me to work on the go—freeing time for other stuff, like my hobbies.
With time, I’ve refined my perfect layout on the lily. I have come to the realization that—something that I saw as shocking and painful to use—whoever was the first to pave the way into <40% keyboards had a genius idea. With layers, less keys is possible and actually better (YMMV) than more keys. You can stash everything you’d ever need into a couple of layers you can access with a combo of thumb cluster keys and have all of your regular functions, cherry-picked for efficiency, literally at your fingertips.
Miss the F-row? Press thumbkey1 and get it back alongside a numrow and symbols or whatever.
Want a numpad? Done, it’s in layer 3 on your right half of the keyboard. Hold thumbkey1 + thumbkey2 to access it.
Given this, I was able to go for a radical 40-key layout without sacrificing anything but whatever time it’d take to learn that keyboard’s layout.
Enter driver40, a keyboard inspired by Horiguchi Hidetaka’s conductor keyboard. When I stumbled upon conductor, I really liked its design and the bells and whistles attatched to it, but I thought I could go further with its concept, and fine-tune it to my needs.
The Process
Building a fully custom keyboard is surprisingly easy nowadays; with just a little bit of tech-wiz and a weekend or two, you can make your very own keyboard.
The Result
Not done yet lol.