Right now I'm iterating on a 34 key split that uses MX spacing horiontally and choc spacing vertically. Uses the splay from the Absolem keyboard and the lowered thumb keys of the Draculad.

Rev 0 was a pretty good success, though there are other tweaks that need to be made.

Pinkies were not staggered enough I've found after trying out the Osprette keyboard. The Osprette features a home pinky location that's equal to the bottom key of the ring finger and feels really comfortable / right. Attempted to do the same for the pointer finger keys, however with such advanced stagger could not comfortably reach the bottom inner column keys. 30-key keyboards maybe have a point?

Additionally wanted to change the location of the ring finger as well. Right now my ring finger naturally wants to rest on the outer ridge of the ring finger home key. To compensate, I moved the key about a third of a U over, increasing the spave to hopefully feel correct. Looking at the spacing, this begs for splay, but will save this for the next iteration for now.

Lastly I wanted to change the thumbs a touch though not a ton as they felt pretty good. I do feel like they may be a little low, but possibly not. With MBK profile keycaps the thumbs weren't ultra comfortable, but once moved to CS felt great. Actuating the key leverages the top joint of your thumb rather than the thumb tip, which for some may be optimal. I chew my fingers a lot, so avoiding having to actuate with the side of my thumb nail where there may be hangnails is a feature, not a bug.

I still did move the thumbs up a touch. Just a smidge. It's hard to tell, as I had a key incorrectly placed inside my Ergogen config that made thumb positioning unreliable and reliant on other keys locations. Future iterations will have a corrected config which will be rock solid, but for now I eyeballed positioning and hope it works out. I do want to play with thumb rotation, but I'm unsure how to measure that. When using arm rests my thumb arc looks one way, and while resting on the table the thumbs arc in a slightly different line. May want to use some combination of the two? Not sure.

Next iteration will leverage cardboard cutouts, so that I can put in switches and test drive on next layout iteration to fully dial in positioning. Overall rev0 did feel comfortable, but not 100% perfect. I may play with an Osprette-like pinky cluster in the future, bumping the key count to 36 keys temporarily.

Initial prototype using 34 keys, choc spacing vertically and MX spacing horizontally with a deep thumb a la Draculad and a touch of splay stolen from the Absolum.

PCB's were ordered from JLCPCB and built roughly Feb 23-24th 2022. Used as a daily driver for about a month before making iterations for Rev 1