I have had a mechanical keyboard for most of my life, but the pandemic turned a prefence into an obsession. I tinkered and toyed with a lot of layouts, but I landed on a 5x12 grid of keys in an "ortholinear" layout as my preferred set-up. It's portable, clean, and reduces the travel I have for every keypress. A desire for a heavy, tactile feeling (I'm somewhat heavy-handed) had me custom-making switches, swapping in heavy springs and swapping out cases until I hit a middle ground of resistance and responsiveness. I topped it off with either PBT or ceramic keycaps, giving the keys a dense, substantial feeling.

Hardware only goes so far. I started diving into QMK, a library that lets you generate firmware for keyboards. I discovered the magic of "layers", or commands that could replace your current keyboard layout with another just by holding or tapping a key. I learned to put multiple keyboard layouts into the same board. At first, it was just media controls. Then I started putting in my common coding symbols. It developed slowly over the years - during my last stretch of my PhD, I noticed I started to have wrist pain. I realized it was likely from moving my hands between my mouse and keyboard, so I wrote a layer that allowed me full system control (pointer, clicking, scrolling, etc.) without lifting my hands. While my firmware is probably only applicable to a tiny slice of keyboard nerds, I hope someone takes some inspiration from my personal design choices.