Specs
- Mass Drop Planck kit.
- Gateron Black Ink (60 grams-Linear) Switches
- Blank Black OEM Keycaps from KPDFans
- Wooden R3 row profile keycap and wooden Wrist Rest from KBDFans
In a previous article, I described my first impressions about using Planck (ortho 40%) keyboards for the first time. I was thrilled back then about the concept, and wasn’t sure whether it is going to maintain its appeal or not, but after an entire year of using it and trying 10 different keymaps and layouts, here is how I feel towards it now.
My Background
To put my review in context, I would like to give you my dear reader about an overview about what I use keyboards for. I work as full time Software Engineer and Senior Team Leader by day and a casual freelancer and blogger by night. And for those who never tried writing code, I would like you to know that we use keyboard heavily through our workdays and use special characters and punctuation symbols almost as frequent as normal alphabetical characters. I don’t game and I have never tried to use it for gaming. So it is a hard core review for typists.
You Only Move Your Fingers, And Rarely Your Hands!
Every touch typist know how important it is to keep your hands resting, or at least hovering around, the home row. And because the Planck was designed with the idea of making all the keys one row or column away from the home rows in mind, your “hands” almost never moves. Which is not the case for even a 60% keyboards in which you may need to move your hands every time you want to hit a backspace for example or stretch your fingers for the numbers & symbols row. This was such a relief because most of the programming symbols are either on the numbers row or at the top right corner of the keyboard after the “P”.
I guess this is because at the early days of designing typewriters, no one had a viable application in which the symbols like { }, [ ], _ , – , +, = were used that frequently like in programming, in addition to using other symbols that are used in text punctuation. This made my pinky suffers whenever I try to reach while keeping my index fingers at the j & f and I became accustomed to moving my hands to reach them just like the backspace. But with Planck, I put all of these characters in or around the home row.
And of course somebody can argue that this can be achieved using any programmable or QMK keyboard, which I actually tried with my Keymove Shadow keyboard, and eventually I stopped using far fetched keys altogether. You can say this was the early seed for thinking about the Planck after finding that even 60% keyboards have more keys, size, and weight than I actually need.
Portable & Small!
No matter whether you need to have a notebook, a tablet or even a couple of laptops on your desk, the Planck saves you a huge space on your desk for any of your other gadget. I keep my 12.9 inch Ipad Pro on my desk all time for note taking or to have a Side Car Screen in addition to my laptop.
You use all of your “12” Fingers!
Yes, the number is correct 12. And this is even shocking for touch typists who use staggered keyboards who know that we already don’t use more than 8 fingers (as the thumbs are used for the space bar only). So where the extra fingers come from?
With Plank you will see how much underrated the thumbs as you use them all the time to shift between layers in addition to Command/ Ctrl and Space.
And for the extra 2 fingers, every user of the planck eventually discover that the palms of hands are always hovering over the bottom right and bottom left keys of the keyboard and can be pressed with pump from palm. This was also suggested by Ben Vallack in his famous video about the Planck and I later found that many eventually fall in love with pump gesture once they try it. I call these corners now the new thumb keys as they can’t use the palm of your hands with anything other than pumping these corner keys 😃.
You only lube 48 keys and mod 2 stabilizers at most!
I am not sure if there are people out there who love lubing switches, but what I am sure that everybody would love the fact that with Planck, you only lube 46 to 48 keys and mod 0 to 2 stabilizers at most depending on the layout.
Conclusion
With confident and without a second thoughts, it is one of the best things happened to me over the past year. I will never use another keyboard for the rest of my life as long as I have access to a Plank. I keep calling it the next step in the evolution of keyboard and consider it a entirely new computer peripheral option which I believe it is going to be the default keyboard layout and concept with time.
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