I made a cheap ergonomic split keyboard using HIDremapper

General
1

Firstly, thanks for this excellent project and documentation; it opens up many opportunities for further projects.

I don’t see many (or any?) people showing off what they have done with HIDremapper, but I thought some might find this interesting. Apologies if I have misinterpreted the vibe of the group.

In short, I turned this:

( a photo of a standard ISO keyboard; with \ to the left of Z, crucially - apparently I can only post one image as a new user)
into this:

image
image1920×891 172 KB

As you can see, it achieves two main things:
1 – it moves the nicely-angled right-hand side over a bit in the style of a split keyboard - even having the hands just a couple of centimetres further apart makes a big difference to my shoulders, elbows, thumbs and right little finger.
2 - it corrects the wrist-breaking angle that one is supposedly expected to maintain on the left-hand side.

Keycaps are from an old laptop, with one side cut off in places so that they extend slightly over the neighbouring keys:

(a photo showing the shape of the laptop keytops showing how they fit with respect to the original keys)

I tried using Autohotkey but it seemed rather laggy and it missed keystrokes when typing quickly. I tried a custom keyboard using MSKLC but the control keys didn’t map as expected. HIDremapper seems to work perfectly (so far)!

I made the mapping table by semi-manually editing the .JSON file using a spreadsheet - this was much easier than I expected.

Maybe at some point I’ll use the keys between the thumbs as layer keys, but I’m very happy with it so far.
Thanks again

2

Very nice!

(At least I think I understand what you did to the keyboard. :slight_smile: )

3

My original keyboard layout was this:

     1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   0   -   =
       Q   W   E   R   T   Y   U   I   O   P   [   ]
        A   S   D   F   G   H   J   K   L   ;   '   #
      \   Z   X   C   V   B   N   M   ,   .   /

I remapped the keys like this:

     #   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   0   =
       Q   W   E   R   T   [   Y   U   I   O   P   -
        A   S   D   F   G   ]   H   J   K   L   ;   '
      Z   X   C   V   B   \   /   N   M   ,   .

Then I stuck laptop keycaps on top of the existing keys (with keys 67890- and QWERT offset 0.25u to the right, ASDFG and /NM,. offset 0.25u to the left) to make them look like this:

     #   1   2   3   4   5    6   7   8   9   0   =     ->
->      Q   W   E   R   T  [   Y   U   I   O   P   -
<-     A   S   D   F   G    ]   H   J   K   L   ;   '
      Z   X   C   V   B   \  /   N   M   ,   .          <-

– and I have a quick and cheap and easy (and easily duplicated) ergonomic keyboard, with function keys, numeric keypad, etc (which I still use).

4

Yeah, it took me a minute to understand how you inverted the stagger on the left half!