Well…

I’m hooked now, I have to learn more. Which keyboard should I get?

It needs to be a 60% (the small ones, which have roughly 60% as many keys as a full-size).

Also it needs to be AZERTY because I’m French and I like this layout. It has fun characters like “é” and “ù” and even “ç”.

Next lesson, layouts are complicated. It’s not just QWERTY vs AZERTY. Those aren’t actually layouts, they’re mappings. If I buy an AZERTY keyboard, it’s actually just a QWERTY but with different labels on the keys. The OS does the conversion.

Cool, so I can get *any* keyboard, right? Nope. Like anything that is going to become an obsession, even the seemingly simple bits are complicated.

There are different layouts. This means that from one layout to another, they have different keys. Not just labels, they literally have more buttons in some places, less in others, and some buttons have different shapes and sizes.

To put it simply, there’s ISO (the international standard that everyone uses), there’s JIS (because Japan is special and likes to do their own thing), and there’s ANSI (because America is also special and likes to do their own thing, except America is super big and powerful and so they pretty much dominate every market so actually ISO isn’t what everyone uses, ANSI is).

Great, AZERTY is an ISO layout (because Europe), and most available mechanical keyboards are ANSI. There are two QWERTY layouts, UK-ISO and US-ANSI. There is no ANSI version of AZERTY though…

Bummer…

Then I discover another option. It’s insane, it’s stupid, it’s going to be super fucking hard, but it’s SO going to be worth it.

You can build your own keyboard.

I can build a hybrid ANSI/ISO keyboard that is both compatible with keysets from treacherous America and layouts from beautiful, wholesome Europe.

After all, what is a keyboard?

It’s a bunch of switches wired to a micro-controller. Really, on the face of it, it’s that simple.

Turns out, there’s a whole community of people who build their own keyboards.