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.