I a 42-key keyboard for a couple of months to see how it compares to keyboards like the Glove80 and Advantage360; keyboards with nearly double the number of keys.

I’d long held the belief that I couldn’t sensibly get by with less than about 55 keys but never put the theory to the test. This was that test.

Introduction to layers

To be successful with a keyboard with this few keys, you are going to need a keyboard that at least supports multiple layers. If you are a bona fide keyboard nerd, you can skip this bit, for you other two reading this, here is what you need to know.

When you start looking at programmable keyboards, it’s not long until you come across the notion of ‘layers’; the ability to have the keys on your keyboard do different things in different situations. Layers mean you can have less physical keys, because each key can do more than one job.

Don’t think too hard about this. Layers are conceptually just the same as pressing shift on the 1 key of your keyboard and, if you are in the UK or US, getting an exclamation mark on your screen. Layers just provide the ability to have more than one modifier key at your disposal to do a greater number of alternative things on each key. So for example, keys on one half of your board would be standard alpha keys, but if you hold in a certain key it would activate another layer, and they now become a numpad; 123456 etc

That is layers, something a standard keyboard does not allow for, aside from the aforementioned shift.

I’ll talk more about the layers I’m using with this Cornish Zen shortly.

What is important to appreciate is that this layering capability makes possible a continuum; at one end of the continuum you could have a keyboard with very few physical keys and many layers, to accommodate every character you may need to type, and at the other end of this continuum is a keyboard with every conceivable key, in physical form, and no layers at all.

So effectively at either end of the continuum, it is choose your poison time, Akshay said it best;

You can either use a keyboard with enough keys to supply all possible inputs (a mechanical burden), or you can use firmware to supply all possible inputs (a cognitive burden). Layers are a cognitive burden.

Reluctance

Whenever I have tried to use considerably less keys in the past, I just didn’t enjoy it. I felt I was constantly tying my fingers up trying to do something that was a single key press on my normal keyboard.

But like some weird cult, the ‘3-key keyboard brigade’ sucked me into their ideology and I decided I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And to do that properly, I needed to ‘go native’.

So, I decided I would spend 30 days with a 42 key version of the Corne, one of the most popular small split keyboards. I was going to build one but as chance would have it, I was lucky enough to snag one of the last Cornish Zens.

I love the Cornish Zen

As a brief aside I love this keyboard, its got a fantastic design, it’s hotswap, so fickle people like me can change switches easily, and it has choc spacing between the keys, making it super compact. It even has these little e-ink screens. Just a wonderful piece of kit. But, this isn’t supposed to be a review. So, long story short, if you could still buy one of these I would recommend it heartily but you can’t so lets move on. You’ll just have to be smug like me, if you have one, and jealous if you don’t. Sorry about that.

But now, back to the challenge

Day One

Day one on a small board with only 42 keys was rough for me. Some things in Vim seemed immediately worse. Using things like $ and ^ to move to the end and beginning of a line was considerably more mentally taxing. Instead of just holding the 4 or 6 key in for to give me those characters as I do on my other boards, I had to do the dance of holding a key on my right side, while I used the number pad I had set on the nav layer on the left. Also things like 22G to go to line 22, or [s to go to the previous spelling error, were surprisingly taxing. Each requiring a layer switch to achieve something that I long ago stopped thinking consciously about.

You need Home Row Mods

The thing that made the challenge of less keys at least viable for me was another feature only made possible with a programmable keyboard, and that is ‘home row mods’. Before I went the small board route, I had never given home row mods a fair crack. I’ve mentioned home row mods in plenty of other videos and articles now but in case the concept is alien to you, it is where you have your modifier keys doubling up on the home row on each hand when you hold the key in. So in my case, each home row key doubles up as hyper, shift, cmd, option, and ctrl when I hold that key in. I just don’t think I could get by on a small board like this without home row mods.

The home row mods setup I used for this board I got from urob and it works very well indeed. I’m getting virtually no problems in use, and having a shift right under my index finger means I don’t miss auto-shift quite as much as I thought I would. I really recommend using Nick Coustos’s editor to set that up in, and I have a video on my YouTube channel that goes into more detail on doing just that. If you want to go and have a read about this, there is a link in the description.

Layouts

The layouts I used throughout this experiment remained largely unchanged throughout. So let me talk about that.

• I have a base Colemak DHm layer, enter is the big thumb on the right, space is the big thumb on the left. I’m doubling up on those keys so that if I hold them, they go to my 1st layer. And my second layer if also selectable from either side by holding in a different thumb cluster key.



• I’ve called layer one my ‘nav’ layer, but it is actually almost everything else that I use regularly. Arrows and brackets and page up/down keys on the right, a numpad and calculator symbols on the left.



• Then I have a ‘system’ layer with F keys, media controls, Bluetooth connections and bootloader mode. I get to that by holding in the top left key.



• My final layer is just for positioning windows in macOS. I’ve shown the system I use to tile my windows and switch applications elsewhere, so check that if you are interested in a super efficient way to switch applications and window arrangements.

Combos

Another firmware feature I used for the first time when I tried this small board is ‘Combos’. With Combos you press two or more keys in unison to send a particular key to the OS. I find the two keys above and below my index fingers on the home row for minus and underscore very intuitive, for example. I also have the two inner home row keys for an equals, and the two bottom corner keys to put my machine to sleep. The top inner keys give me Caps Word, which is kind of like Caps Lock except it toggles itself off when you press space.

Regardless of these new inventive features, I found the first day quite physically tiring, especially on my forearms. Not sure why that was, whether I’d just become so accustomed to the keywells of my other keyboards or I was actually holding my wrists differently because of the anticipation of having to switch the layers and hold in keys to do different things like use the arrows.

Day two

The second day involved a lot of work in the design program Sketch. Less keys was generally fine, although I realised that almost all of the problems I was encountering were just muscle memory issues. You don’t actually know what half of the shortcuts you use day to day are. You think you do but you likely just know what shape you make with your fingers on the keyboard. I found myself thinking about how I hold my hands and then having to consciously think what lives on those keys on my other boards. Then I had to translate that into the layout I had made for myself on the smaller board. So it definitely slowed things down a lot.

Day Three

By day three I was starting to feel like I was going backwards. I suspect my flea sized mind had already got bored of the challenge, and no longer wanted to go the extra mile to achieve things that were ordinarily second nature.

However, it was on day three when I just rested my hands on the Advantage360 that was also on my desk and thought that it now seemed comically big. Not sure what that really meant but I felt like a kid trying on my mums shoes.

We all did that right? Come on don’t act like you didn’t.

Ten days in

After nine or ten days with the board I started to really wonder if the characters I’d taken the time to put into easy spots were actually the characters I should be putting in the easiest spots.

Text analysis

To provide a little insight, I thought it would be interesting to test which characters I typed the most, aside from the standard alpha numeric ones. Specifically, I was interested in things like =, -, _, ", ', “`. I created a little rudimentary string analyser and pasted in the contents of three typical files; one CSS, one TS and the other markdown.

The results looked like this:

Across those files, minus was the most used character (317 instances), then double-quote (280 instances), followed closely by equals (258 instances).

This was just one data point using 3 random files but it made me more confident that my suspicions were largely correct and I had the most frequently used characters as accessible as possible. I must admit though, I was surprised just how little I actually typed a single quote.

Half way through

Around halfway through the 30 day experiment window I started to feel that the muscle memory was pretty much there.

At this point, I was ready to concede that with practice you can be just as productive with a small board as you can with a board with many more keys. It is all just muscle memory at the end of the day.

Comfort was good at this point too. The pains I had suffered initially had left. It helped that the Cornish Zen is so low to the desk, but even putting that aside, with fewer keys, there are less finger stretches to do, and thanks to the split and the home row mods, the chording is typically a combination of both hands. For example, when I want to move along Terminal windows or tabs in the browser, I need to press option+cmd+arrows. To make that easier I have keys for that in the nav layer. When I want to bring up the command palette in Sublime Text, it is shift+cmd on the right, and p on the left. Very civilised.

More productive?

But here is the big question. Was I actually any more productive at this point? I don’t think so. I think enough keys or enough layers is equally viable. At the half way point I was thinking it was certainly just as comfortable as a board with many more keys, even though you are usually pressing more keys at once for the same result. This gets offset by the fact that those extra keys are typically either under, or very close to the home row.

But I definitely did feel at the halfway point that having a number pad on a layer is definitely a win, and something I should have done a long time ago on my other programmable boards.

The end of a month

As I came to the end of the month, one thing I wasn’t expecting, that really stood out, was just how comfortable this board is for me when writing prose. If I just wrote for a living, I think this would probably be the most comfortable board to type on that I have. Perhaps it is the lowness, or the tightness of the Choc spaced keys on the Choc-spaced Corne, perhaps these Sunset switches or these new LDSA keycaps, or perhaps it is the sum of all these things but, everything feels just in reach. With fewer keys there are simply fewer choices, your fingers are never more than one key of travel from what you need. So in that regard it helps with my accuracy.

When I have subsequently added a numpad layer to the 360, it isn’t quite so effective, I occasionally get lost in midst of all the keys.

Having gotten used to curved boards like the Advantage360, and Glove80, I thought I would struggle more but moving from something like this Corne to those bigger boards can feel a little laborious at first in comparison.

However, I don’t just write prose, and this is where after some time things started to come undone for me.

Not all good news in keyboard minimalism

I think the only thing that still catches me out is the lack of dedicated arrow keys. Working in design software a lot, as well as code, it’s just something I would still favour dedicated keys for. The frustration definitely wanes over time, and you could get used to it from a mental burden point of view (much as I did when using a HHKB for years), but I think if I could have extra keys just for that purpose I definitely would. I also started to develop thumb pain, or perhaps more accurately tiredness, in the left hand towards the end of my experiment, I put this down to needing to hold down a key to access my navigation layer with the arrows on so much.

Now of course, instead of holding a key to swap layers I could have a key to toggle the layer on and another to toggle it off, but then, what’s the point? If I need the arrows all the time, why not just have arrows all the time. Insisting on less keys in the face of obvious advantages to having more keys is cutting off my nose to spite my face. And these factors are very frustrating because I love this 42 key board, and the similar ZSA Voyager, an awful lot, but after extended periods, I do suffer some discomfort in my thumbs, as there is nowhere decent to put the dedicated arrow keys my working life demands.

Swapping back

As I got past a month using 42 keys, I was really looking forward to getting back onto one of my ‘normal’ size keyboards. I thought I would really appreciate it. However, the reality is, the more muscle memory you build up on one slightly different board, the more you lose it on another. Subsequently, I have found myself more and more pushing the larger board back on my desk, and pulling this Corne out of my backback. There has been a transition back over many months to where I now mostly type on something like the Advantage360, Glove80 or more conventional Boardwalk or Promenade. But I do relish a spell where I know I won’t be writing code or using design software, because I switch to one of the boards with fewer keys and really enjoy it.

What have I learned

Whether you prefer extra keys or extra layers, I don’t think one is categorically better than the other. You can get by with either, and your brain will figure out the layering on a smaller board.

You can definitely be equally productive with less keys, but it does require adopting some newer features of programmable boards. Plus, there will always be the odd thing which relies on something your ‘oh so clever’ little board invalidates. For example, in Sketch, you press and hold the space bar to pan the canvas. On this board, I can’t press and hold my space because that key is my mod tap for the nav layer. Now, I could introduce a ‘tap dance’ function there to solve that problem, or I can just use a more sensible sized keyboard where I don’t have to be so clever!

Summary

So more keys or more layers? Ultimately, like so many of these divisive questions, there isn’t a clear answer. I enjoy these smaller boards and it is possible for some people to be just as productive with them but they are not the end game for me; having a dedicated arrow cluster is just too useful for my working life.

But for some people, I’ll certainly concede that less might be more.

Links

• The Cornish Zen
• UROB info on Home Row Mods
• LSDA keycaps
• Sunset low profile switches
• ZMK Combos
• Caps Word
• ZMK editor Video