I mean I get by reading a bit from the hackaday post that there are combos or 'chords' and so I guess you are meant to memorize these chord claw combinations for things, and yes I see the videos of people claiming it can be fast etc etc but....
man I just don't get how someone could just unlearn the muscle memory of a normal keyboard layout. I had a partner with a Spanish layout keyboard macbook where a just a few keys are mixed around compared to ANSI and even after sitting with it many times it was still nearly un-useable for me... and that was just a few keys swapped around!
I have noticed all the people building and using these reduced-key-count keyboards on youtube are all very young people. So maybe it has something to do with still having a pliable brain and not having decades of muscle memory to get past.
Then mix in the emacs, vim, kakoune obsession and, well, fluidity in key memorization is king.
Have tinkered with the dvorak layout or similar but can't really commit because that is actually the one thing where the effort curve takes too long to pay off for me.
I turn 44 this month FWIW.
Curious to know if you have any thoughts about the Eucalyn layout. It's a layout focused on Japanese, Vim, and Dvorak: https://eucalyn.hatenadiary.jp/entry/about-eucalyn-layout
Shameless plug, this is my Dvorak/Vim focused layout Small Board for Dvorak (SB4DV): https://github.com/1MachineElf/qmk_firmware/tree/_sb4dv/keyb...
Anyone who types in a language that uses a lot of non-keyboard characters (think accents, etc) is already used to some of it.
Thank you for confirming that we didn't type that slow back then. I felt like I was faster on physical keyboards.
Same thinking can be applied to speed too, hand repositioning and finger-stretching are not fast things to do, so concentrating functionality near home positions allows you to do the keypresses very fast which trades off the number of keypresses.
This all said, I personally haven't used such keyboards, this is more of second hand impressions
Honestly - this is the draw to unusual layouts to me. It's significantly helped RSI for typing too much. I don't need 'ultimate speed' really as much as comfort and physically being able to type.
It's medical! At least that's what i tell my wife (... and myself) when the credit card bill comes in.
While plain writing was fine with both layouts, what really made them unappealing to me is that I just could not use Vim anymore. A lot of working with Vim is blasting through chains of single button presses that have become second nature to me over the decades. With alternative layouts my text editing just ground to a crawl.
Douglas Adams used a Cambridge Z88 for writing! Prior to laptop batteries becoming decent once swappable batteries became less common, serious journos frequently used to turn to the slabtop even a decade ago.
There's something very human and intimate in the usage of it, despite modern clamshells obviously having better viewing angles and giving you a better posture. They feel very natural and intuitive, in the same way a pen and paper does.
The older ones are also frequently very easy to read in the sunshine, and the batteries can last a long time.
The AlphaSmart Neo 2 gets 700h of battery life, but is more of a word processor with extras like applets.
Also huge nerds for ThinkPads, but that's another, non-slabtop story.
There's also something more social about it, if you're using it to take notes while around other people. A screen pointed towards you is a private space; a screen visible to the room is more public (and less prone to distraction as a result because it's obvious to those around you if you're fooling around).
I use a TRS-80 Model 100 as a notetaking device for that reason. (Well, also because it's nearly incapable of doing anything that could distract me on the go!)
One of the clever things it had was two holes in the back. They were (by design or happenstance) perfectly sized for regular pencils. You cut the pencils to your desired length, shove them in the holes and use the erasers for rubber feet. Perfect to get the angle just right.
M100 had one of the best keyboards I ever used.
And to be fair, the 40 column display is much more reasonable for this form factor. 80 columns gets pretty small, pretty fast. Nice thing about text based web pages and word processing documents is that they wrap just fine to 40 characters.
I do like the idea of having a very small, limited OS. I’ve often thought I’d love an updated Psion 5. With modern batteries and displays, you should be able to get months out of a set of batteries or battery charge.
Those image file sizes are bonkers for what I'm trying to look at.
I do wish there were more slabtops
Right now I use a-Shell and iSH to have surprisingly powerful CLI sandboxes in iOS, but having a normal userland would be great.
Curious about weight and (metric) dimensions, though. Thickness (or lack thereof) is one of the advantages of my current setup.
If you are looking for an -almost- as powerful SBC (with m.2 support as I see you have it in the original design), give a look at Rock5-B (1), I didn’t test it personally unlike nVidia ones, but it seems it has a great specs, as you might also struggle to secure jetson ones sometimes due to stocks being sold out.
(1) https://ameridroid.com/collections/rock5-model-b/products/ro...
To be clear, I'm not looking for something you can't do already (your phone does everything), but something that a cyberdeck computer would _excel_ at.
Although with the new, more powerful phones I could also carry a small USB dock instead. I've done random emergency work on N900 before.
I think you're asking the question in good faith, but it's a bit like looking at an Arduino, Raspberry Pi 2040, or Raspberry Pi 4B and asking, "what can these do that an Intel laptop can't do better?"
I don't know the author's background in (practical) electronics work, but as an embedded developer and long-time hobbyist: obviously there are solutions for de-soldering things that don't involve dremeling them to atomic dust. I'm just saying.
