Professor, Designer, Husband, Father, Gamer, Bagpiper

This is just a quick update to yesterdays first impressions of my Dygma keyboard.

Overall, I'm happy with it so far, after just a half dozen more hours.  I've mostly gotten used to hitting the lower right Escape key (the red Fn in the picture below), and the lack of tilt doesn't bother me too much (the split is by far more important).  I like the compactness, so my mouse isn't so far off to the right.)

The arrows are a bit more of a challenge.  My current layout is below, showing the basic keyboard on the left and the "arrow and function key layout" on the right.  (I don't have anything else in that layer, I removed the default "keypad" layout on the right side since I wanted arrows there).

The colors are meaningful.  I set the "..." modifier keys as Cmd keys (along with the Dygma keys they sit beside) instead of the default space keys. The two "." modifier keys are "shift to layer 1" since I wanted to try both hands.  And (as mentioned above) "Esc" is actually "`/~".

I mostly have ended up using my right thumb and the IJKL triangle for arrows.  The whole point of not having separate arrow keys is to reduce hand motion so that (eventually) using them will be fast (once I stop always moving to the lower right where my brain things the arrows should be).  Initially, I was using my left thumb and the ShiftAltCtrlFn triangle, but I found that a lot of the time I use arrow keys, I also use modifiers (control, alt, shift) to select, move by world, or move to the end of the line in editors.  Holding the left thumb "." and using the modifiers is too awkward and probably bad for my hand.

So, we'll see how it goes.  I'm narrowing in on this particular configuration, eventually I'll free up some of the options and find new uses for the left side of Layer 1, and the left "." key, I think.

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