Mechanical Keyboards

When I got my Planck late last year, I ended up putting it aside most of the time due to my difficulty with using the ortholinear layout. I felt kinda bad about neglecting it so over the past two weeks I’ve been forcing myself to use the keyboard exclusively when working outside, and what a difference it’s been. I can actually type at decent speeds right now, and even though the bottom row is still a challenge to me, I think I can actually get used to it (I’m up to 76wpm now). Good thing humans are adaptable creatures.

The main issue I face with this board was with QMK. I’m happy that the people working on it have been keeping it updated, and they’ve been very responsive on reddit and discord. Big shout out to them. For people who want to stick with the default layout, this won’t be an issue since you don’t need to mess around with keymaps and setting up build environments.

In terms of build quality, you get what you pay for. I do have two screws that seem to unscrew themselves from time to time, I’m not sure why, but I’ll have to implement a fix in the future.

For my layout, I haven’t changed much since my initial setup but yesterday I remapped it to be closer to my other 40% keyboards because I find myself going to the same hotkeys on this board, so I’ve got another retraining step to do. Having an arrow cluster is quite useful – when paired with the function key, I get a very intuitive page up/down, home/end key cluster.

I have also replaced my BOX Royals with Gateron Greens because I find them more enjoyable to type on. BOX Royals do sound real nice in this case though. I’m still using the KBDFans XDA set I designed. May or may not replace them in the future, depending on how much I want to invest in the Planck. I’ll probably be on the lookout for a nicer case.

Maybe I need a few more months with it, but I honestly don’t feel the benefits this keyboard has over my other 40% keyboards. 40% keyboards are already tiny, I have no issues hitting every key from the home row regardless of the stagger – the ortholinear layout only confuses my muscle memory. The best thing about the keyboard is its portability. It’s the lightest keyboard I currently own and I really enjoy traveling with it in my backpack.

So, I finally received my Planck keyboard and I’ve been using them on and off for over a week so I thought I’d write a quick post about it just because I haven’t written anything this week.

For those of you who don’t know, the Planck is a 40% ortholinear keyboard – which means the keys aren’t staggered like a regular keyboard (look at how A is slightly to the right of Q, Z is slightly to the right of A and so on), the keys are lined up in a grid instead. This is supposedly better in terms of ergonomics, but since I haven’t had any issues typing on staggered layouts all these years, I don’t really feel the difference. However, this grid layout introduces a new problem for me (which I assume will go away with time) – muscle memory.

Maybe I’m just a slow learner but I’m having a lot of trouble adapting to the Planck layout. I find myself hitting the wrong keys even if I look at the keyboard to type just because my hands automatically reach out to hit the keys when I have a word to type. It gets annoying when you have to use backspace multiple times while writing a single sentence. Because of this issue, I find myself not using the Planck as much as I’d like to. Other than that, I have no qualms about the keyboard. Initially I had some trouble remapping the keys due to a problem with the QMK configurator site, but since that has been sorted out, everything is fine and dandy, the way I like it.

In terms of build quality – you get what you pay for. I bought the EOTW (easy on the wallet) version of the board because I wanted to try out the layout, and for how cheap it was, I thought it was worth it. The EOTW plates are gorgeous, and so is the PCB. Definitely one of the nicest looking PCBs I’ve seen for a keyboard. The form factor is great – I love how light and tiny it is, though it might feel a little fragile due to the lack of a case (which can be easily solved by spending more money).

Overall – at least based on my short experience with the Planck, I think ortho is not for me. That being said – for people who have issues using staggered layouts, this could be a viable option for a more ergonomic keyboard. At this point in time, I see no benefits to relearning how I type so I don’t think I’ll be an ortho user in the future. That being said, I’m still going to continue using it over the next few months. If my typing doesn’t improve on it, I’ll just turn it into a giant macropad or try to flip it.