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Comment by jonquark | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a hardware tinkerer - but if there was a production version of this, I would buy it. But I guess I'm a niche market.

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Watched the video and super excited to see where tech like this ends up in a few years. Was on the quest to find a split keyboard last week and ran across this. Ended up with a UHK, but man I thought hard about buying one (pair) of these. I was just worried about dust, dirt and overall longevity. Seems like something that would need to be worked on every month or two. The kit is reasonable and might be a fun (next) project.

https://svalboard.com/

Would be interested to hear about anyone's experience that owns one of these. How do they hold up? How long did it take to get used to using? Would you recommend to a friend?

I'm not aware of any production version of Chordite (that this design is based on) as of now; but in the wider family of chorded keyboards, the one with a production version that I'm aware of is the Twiddler.

I was going to say I have a old twiddler 2 (wired usb). There was this program I used to learn called "twidor" that was like a type tutor but had graphic that showed you the chords. Really helpful. I didn't see anything like that in the github repository linked in the video. I guess they are up to twiddler 4 now. I read the linked chordite page and I agree that a problem with the twiddler is you are kind of trying to hold the thing steady so you can chord with the same fingers you chording with.

https://wearables.cc.gatech.edu/projects/twidor/screens.html

I don't have a program at the moment. The layout I currently use is in the codebase, starts here: https://github.com/akavel/clawtype/blob/96980f68427eb1089112... Personally, I just edited this layout description into a more compact form and printed it on a sheet of A4 paper as a cheatsheet. I do intend to make this aspect more scriptable, but didn't get to it yet.

For learning, I personally just try to slowly code simple hobby things in vim, with the cheatsheet in the other hand... I tried to make the layout relatively intuitive wherever I could. I also patiently went through all the possible combinations of presses, and tried to group them into categories of easy<->medium<->hard<->impossible, then tried to put esp. the more frequently used keys on the easier combinations/chords.

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