Ergodox Aleph Build Log Chapter 1: It Started With Keycaps
Crossposted from cohost In late 2020, The Key Dot Company and Mintlodica debuted a second release of the much-lauded DSA Magical Girl. They look like this:
I was absolutely smitten with it. No particular reason, magical girls weren't a big part of my childhood. To this day I don't think I've seen an entire episode of Sailor Moon. But the vibes… the vibes were impeccable.
I needed them.
If you look at the above image closely, you might notice something interesting. The left half of the alpha keys are a teal, and the right side are more of a pink. It's a cute little asymmetry. But for me, it was a big problem. You see, I use Dvorak, and so if I placed the keycaps in Dvorak order the blue and pink would look all mismatched and weird.
A brief aside on keycap profiles
The “DSA” in DSA magical girl doesn't have anything to do with the rose-loving socialists. Keys are available in a wide variety of “profiles,” which is a fancy word for what shape the actual keycaps are. Most keyboards you're used to (at least if you grew up in the 90s like me) are sloped depending on where they fall on the keyboard.
This means if you were to say, rearrange all of the keys on your keyboard, because you were eleven and wanted to teach yourself Dvorak, even though there's no proven benefits and it'll make using other people's computers annoying for the rest of your life but not annoying enough to switch back to QWERTY, they'd look awkward and misshapen, like your keyboard really needed braces. But DSA keycaps are all completely identical regardless of location. The point of this sidebar is that using this keyboard as Dvorak would not result in any functional difference. The colours would look a little odd, but nobody but me would notice. Furthermore, I've been able to touch-type for almost two decades, so I'd never see them.
Now, there was a solution. There was another set of keycaps you could get as an addon that featured the compliment of the above keys. Left side all in pink, right side in purple. Mix and match them and boom, easy Dvorak keyboard. But it was expensive: The base set was already $135, and the add-on was another $50, with tax and shipping it was pushing $200. As a known miser and cheapskate, surely I wouldn't consider anything quite so frivolous.
Ah.
Well, now I just need a keyboard. And that meant learning about…
Mechanical Keyboards
Ah, yes, the keyboard itself. See, that $200 didn't buy me a finished product I could actually plug in and use. No, these were just keys! The doorknob of the keyboard world. Gorgeous, but nothing but fancy show pieces without a keyboard to place them on.
What's that? Just use my existing keyboard? Excellent point, except I used one of these:
These had thin little keys, the kind you might expect to see on a laptop. That's fine, it was totally adequate, and I've been using it for years. But! Those keycaps were not a frivolity, not a decorative plate hung on the wall. I wanted to use them, and they (I believe) wanted to be used.
That meant buying a mechanical keyboard, one of the best examples of how fractal human communities are that I've ever seen.
There are literally thousands of choices that run the gamut from “cheap thing you bought on Aliexpress” to “Thousand-dollar custom show piece.” These “keebs,” as they're known in the parlance, are an incredibly personal choice. Different people like different shapes, weights, materials, colours, and a hundred other variables. And of course, I couldn't find one that did quite what I wanted.
Split Keyboards
I really liked the ergonomics of my Sculpt, and I wanted to continue with a keyboard like it. The sort of canonical mechanical split keyboard is the Ergodox.
But I didn't like these for a couple reasons. 1, they're expensive. Here's a quick spec:
Oof. Over five hundred dollars with the caps, just on a keyboard?
“You spend forty hours a week using this, maybe more, and you've probably got a work stipend for desk equipment you could —”
PLUS this one doesn't have hot-swappable key-switches! I'd never used a mechanical keyboard before, and I don't know what I like!
(Remember how I said keyboards were fractal? In addition to choosing keycaps, you can also get boards, cases, and switches separately. You chose them and assemble yourself, like a custom bicycle or an IKEA kitchen)
And there's no RGB! Think how cool those keycaps would look with soft purple backlights!
I spent a lot of time, looking at a lot of different split keyboards. Some had too few keys, some weren't shaped right, some only came pre-soldered.
Eventually I discovered the Ergodox Infinity, and I kind of fell in love with it.
Look at these little screens!
I could use them to indicate what keyboard layer was active! They could output debug information! I could play Bad Apple on them.
Now, did this have RGB? No. Hot swap switches? Also no. In fact, you can't even buy them. Other than the occasional Ebay listing, they've been out of production for years.
But there was one saving grace, or perhaps a horrible curse. A thing that would define my free time for years to come.
This keyboard was open source.
Next Time, on yak shave theatre this build log: The Ergodox Aleph is born.
