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Minimal Kinda-Staggered 40% Keyboard Layout Design

At some point I noticed at least most of my 40% keyboards have more less the same layout (probably because I like 40% keyboards with cursor clusters), but that they differ in the overall width:

  • Planck (4x12 ortholinear, no stagger; I do have its bigger brother, the 5x12 Preonic): 12u
  • Zlant: 12.75u (over all width; per-row width is 12u like a Planck)
  • UT47.2: 12.5u
  • MiniVan: 12.75u
  • BM43a: 12u
  • Daisy: 12u

Comparing them shows where they reduce width:

  • The MiniVan is closest to standard ANSI layout, especially with regards to row offsets.

  • The UT47.2 is — except for the bottom row — very similar to the MiniVan. It reduces the overall width by 0.25u by reducing the offset between the ASDF and ZXCV row from standard 0.5u to 0.25u, i.e. having the same stagger offset between all three rows with alphabetic characters. Accordingly Backspace and Enter are shrunk by 0.25u to make all rows the same width again.

  • The Zlant is — except for the bottom row — very similar to the UT47.2. Only that the edge keys are all 1u and hence the offsets are also present on the edges.

  • The BM43a is kinda the exception: It mostly looses width by having removed one more column, the one with the ;: and .> keys, and then shrinking Backspace to 1u. Since this is only a difference of 0.75u to the MiniVans width, but it has the cursor cluster at 1u key cap widths at right end, it had to extend the offset between the ASDF and the ZXCV rows by 0.25u to 0.75u — which makes it look a bit awkward and scares off some users.

  • The Daisy does the same as the BM43a, just without that awkward non-standard offset. It uses an 1.25u arrow right (and left) key instead.

And then there is the Alpha28, a semi-ortholinear, semi-staggered sub-30% keyboard which has no offset between the QWERT and the ASDF rows (like an ortholinear keyboard) and 0.5u offset between the ASDF and the ZXCV rows (like a standard staggered keyboard).

I found this kind of stagger reduction quite comfortable to type on.

The Design

So I basically took the UT47.2 design, shifted the top row 0.25u to the right to reduce the stagger to the next row to zero. Then I reduced the leftmost keys in the two middle rows by 0.25u, too, to align the left edges again. In the end I took the bottom row of the MiniVan and used 4× 1.25u modifier keys (i.e. even standard sizes!) instead of 4× 1u and 1× 1.5u keys to spare 0.5u of overall bottom row width compared to the MiniVan.

So I end up with a 12.25u overall width of a keyboard which is very similar to the UT47.2 and MiniVan while still reducing the overall width by 0.25 respectively 0.5u — and only being 0.25u away from the 12u BM43a while having two more keys and an IMHO much more comfortable non-standard stagger.

XTM 45

XTM 45

layout in JSON format

(The JSON layout file is meant for usage with the Keyboard Layout Editor and compatible tools.)