Hey,

I’m looking for a portable ortholinear for taking to co-working in my backpack.

For context, I’m a coder. I use neovim all day. At home I use a maltron 3d. It’s a fantastic comfortable keyboard (I think kinesis nicked the design?), although it did take getting used to.

It’s the only keyboard I’ve ever been able to touch type on.

So yeah. I’d like to find something similar that is portable. It has to have quiet switches, as it’s a shared office. Any suggestions?

So far I’ve looked at:

Those all look nice, but are too expensive.

How does the ergodox ez hold up these days?

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    1·
    3 months ago

    Can you tell me about your experience with it?

    Do you find it easy to lug around in a backpack? Is it easy to set up after you’ve ported it?

    I’m slightly worried that the layout configurator is web-based and could disappear at any moment. Is there an offline tool you can use for the same purpose?

    • 667English
      2·
      3 months ago

      I enjoy it, though there is a little effort friction with deploying the tilt legs, but beyond that it’s a delight, and highly configurable, and well-supported both in the community and from the company. For example, the USB port on mine had some demonstrable connection issues after I received it; I contacted the company and they replaced it immediately under warranty.

      While Oryx is a convenient online configuration tool, the firmware is open-source, called QMK (https://qmk.fm/guide), and it seems the project also has a GUI configurator.

      When folded and stored in its case, the Moonlander is quite compact, though it’s not tiny. It will fit in a regular-sized backpack if it’s not already packed to the brim.