48 keys are plenty | Callum Oakley

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2021-07-20 12:30:06

I use my computer a lot, and I mostly interact with it through text, so taking some time to think about my keyboard is certainly time well spent. For about three years now, I’ve been a devoted user of the Planck: a programmable grid of 48 single unit keys.

Apart from occasionally using the internal keyboard on my laptop I haven’t used another keyboard since making the switch, and am fully convinced that the Planck is an improvement on a conventional board in every way. Bear with me.

The core premise in the design of the Planck is that your fingers should never have to move more than one unit (or diagonal) away from the home position to hit any key (looking at you +, =, }, ]). This naturally gives us a 3 by 12 grid of keys for the 8 fingers to work with.

The next key observation is that the thumbs can do a lot more than we normally task them with. The space bar is a huge waste of space, especially if our hands aren’t moving around as much as they would be on a full sized keyboard. In fact it’s no harder to hit a single unit space “bar” with the thumb than it is any other single unit key, so we can have a bottom row of another 12 one unit keys for the full compliment of 48 keys. This nicely fits all our alphas, all the usual modifiers, and then some.