Right now I’m just carrying a Tex Shinobi with me and setting that on top of the laptop keyboard to work. If that’s a bit large for people, the lenovo thinpad compact USB keyboard or the Happy Hacking Studio Charcoal that came out recently could work.
I am working on a different approach to get a trackpoint keyboard that may be a little easier than op’s solution, but a lot kludgier. I grabbed the lenovo USB keyboard from amazon and ripped out the insides. Next, I’m looking to just 3d print a “case” for it that would replace the current keyboard and trackpoint sections. Obviously the screen won’t completely close with the added thickness needed for the trackpoint, so I’m planning on having the front end stay open a bit, and adding support to the screen and the keyboard area so that the whole laptop is just thicker at the front when closed. I figure we’d need to do that whether we boosted the hinge or not.
The nice thing about this approach is that there’s no custom electronics other than the pogo pad to USB-micro connector, and that’s entirely passive.
This will also allow me to add a yubikey to the keyboard area that doesn’t take up one of the expansion ports. The other side may get an m.2 drive connector, though the USB speeds on the keyboard port may just make that annoying, I’m not sure.
Hopefully we’ll get something real before too long, but when I talked to the framework team, they said that they wanted a trackpoint keyboard too, but they just hadn’t found a way to do it in the depth they had available. The trackpoint itself just adds too much thickness. This might have been able to be addressed in the early production of the design, but at this point It’s way too late.