I got my Geekhack keys today and installed them tonight on my work (tenkeyless) and sc2 keyboards.

Tonight I installed my custom keys that I ordered from Geekhack.

So the new keyboard is not working out so great but probably due to bad decisions I’ve made along the way.

Last week I finally ordered a Kinesis keyboard off of Amazon. When I got it I also made the horrible decision to try dvorak! Its going slowly to say the least.

Regardless I love the keyboard! Enter and backspace were made to be under your thumbs for sure. As you can see in the photo I'm also trying out a trackball. Havn't used one of those in years.

My plan for emacs is not to do anything. I'm just going to use standard keybindings for now. Emacs bindings are already not based on key location so I'm not worried. I'll make a new post if I make any config changes.

A while ago (before this blog) I decided I was going to spend good money on my equipment to play Starcraft II. I ended up buying a Filco keyboard since that's what the general consensus was as far as good keyboards at the time. Fruitdealer was seen with a Filco at one point and I think that sparked a insurgance in purchasing them. At the time the only american distributer was Elite Keyboards. Unfortunately by the time I was shopping Elite had sold out of their Filco's and weren't planning on restocking. Filco had become really slow with orders (probably due to the influx of customers that Starcraft II brought). I ended up buying a Filco 104 key NKRO keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches (tactile action) from the geekhack.org classifieds. If anyone is looking for rare finds or just for more info about good keyboards, that is the BEST place. Their wiki is FULL of info about the keyboards, about buying keyboards, about how switches work, etc.

Since then a couple of things have happened. Elite is going to start selling Leopold keyboards. This is another Cherry MX mechanical keyboard and just like the Filcos, can be bought in black, brown or blue switches (for more info here check out geekhack.org). Right now they have some tenkeyless boards on the site but not quite for sale. Check back often because the price on these boards are very good!

For myself after seeing some tenkeyless boards at the NE Sc2 tournaments I decided that I wanted to get a tenkeyless to go with my 104 key board. Of course I wanted this to be a Filco so that they matched as much as possible. Unfortunately a tenkeyless brown Filco didn't appear on geekhack during this time. The Keyboard Co was also out of stock of brown switch (but not blue and black) Filco's. Luckily just recently the keyboard company is distributing to the US market via Amazon! This is great news since currently that's the easiest way to get a Filco keyboard is through that Amazon page. You can even get Prime shipping if you are a prime member! I immediately ordered a tenkeyless brown Filco from amazon last night! Right after I ordered many assecories (Blue WASD set, Red Esc key set, Medium sized roof and blank windows keys) so that the keyboard would match my full size perfectly. I can't wait to get it!

For my mouse I use a Steelseries Xai. I love this mouse. It's a completely normal design (not too many buttons or anything) and feels great in my hand. I use one of their mouse pads as well and the mouse feels amazing on it. This mouse allows you to customize the DPI to whatever you want. Currently I think I'm using 1600 to be able to cross my 1920 monitor in a little over an inch on the pad. This allows you to set your windows and starcraft sensitivity to 6/11 and 51% respectively and just use the mouse settings to control the rate of movement. The mouse feels great and stores the settings on the mouse itself so when I goto a lan I just have to make sure that the windows settings are back to normal (and the same thing in Starcraft).

So I really like my setup and can't wait to try out the tenkeyless as well! Go Filcos!