Just curious, how much time would you say it took you to 1) build and make it, 2) get used to the layout?
In my case, I had some bad habits I was needing or wanting to get rid of at the same time: I typed "b" with the wrong finger, I always used my right pinky for shift, I always looked when typing numbers so I never really got to touch-typing them, sometimes I would also peek for regular letters or keys, just to make sure I was where I thought I was.
If you have fewer bad habits, it might take less time. If you have more... :-)
Depends on how you define 'build' here, I'm assuming you mean come to what would become the final design for GergoPlex. That took about a year and a half, my first two designs (Gergo and Georgi respectively) sought to improve on my issues with the ErgoDox (mostly size, PCB-forehead, height, thumb-cluster). After a year of using Gergo and diving into QMK and a failed attempt at picking up stenography, I came up with the idea for a more chord-orientated layout. It didn't take long to get working hardware (as it was a reduction of an existing design), but the layout took about two weeks before everything had settled into it's final place. I did a bit of a write-up over on the blog of how I ended up dailying GergoPlex from a full size 104 [1] and the slow descent into preprocessor madness [2] to make the Combo decorators work. The weird part was tuning QMK so combos like 'we' wouldn't misfire while typing and analyzing my Vim usage to find comfortable places for frequently used chords. (Such as JK for :, WE or UI for Esc, NM for Enter, XC for -, M< for _, etc)
>get used to the layout
At every transitional step I'd say maybe a week? The harder part was finding a keymap that worked for me. But I started with a Sun-Style layout on the ErgoDox and slowly adpated it as I moved to smaller boards. Control is on 'A' (and ';') on GergoPlex for that reason, and the symbols layers are fairly similar. Honestly, just using it in a active chat server for a few hours was enough to get me 90% of the way there.
Every users needs are going to be different, and their layout should match that (it's _why_ you get a programmable keyboard after all!). How you get there is a fiddly endeavour involving lots of flashing and tweaking, but you end up with something ergonomic and deeply personal!
[1] https://blog.gboards.ca/2020/01/weird-keyboards-programmable...
[2] https://blog.gboards.ca/2020/02/adventures-in-obscure-c-feat...
I'll definitely make the plunge at some point, just gauging expectations on how roughly much I should expect to invest time-wise before :)
Thank you for your work, I think it's hard to appreciate the contribution things like the ergodex is making for moving towards chorded and other more suitable text input interface for computers. Especially as we transition to VR.
No worries, we spend all day using these devices, the fact that we're not using them in a highly configurable fashion pains me. Make technology work for you, not the other way around
Had completely missed it, thanks for the pointer :)