@nrp The picture I sent is from a 13.3" Clevo computer. Even if the Framework laptop has less border around the screen, there should be no reason to be unable to fit these full-sized keys in the keyboard. At least the arrow keys.
In fact, even a 12" Asus EeePC 1201 had a full keyboard in 2009 (well, I guess the keys were a bit smaller):
Honestly, full-sized arrow keys are really much more comfortable.
Real begin/end/page-up/page-down keys (instead of key combination) are also a plus when you are coding on your laptop. I know very few coders who are using an external keyboard.
We use a 3:2 aspect ratio screen, which makes the body of the Framework Laptop narrower than 16:9 13.3" laptops. Between getting a great screen aspect ratio for productivity, avoiding making the system wider than it needs to be, and keeping full size key caps, we utilized all space available for the keyboard. We certainly would have added an extra column of keys if we could fit it!
I guess everyone needs to understand the keyboard options are going to be limited to whatever can fit between the holes in the chassis; things like adding extra keys to the right of enter or things like an ortholinear layout probably won’t be possible.
That being said, there’s still options! I for one would love to see T-shaped arrow keys in the future, maybe with the top half of the left and right arrow keys substituted with hard rubber or something you can’t press, and so on.
Please can we have an HHKB keyboard layout variant? I use that layout exclusively and find it fantastic. I would buy a framework laptop based on that alone
HHKB is an initialism for the Happy Hacking KeyBoard. Its a keyboard that is notorious for its typing feel as well as the layout. It’s the layout that I’m curious about being an option here… that notably has the Control key in place of CapsLock among a few other changes. Here’s the layout:
It’s quite popular in the custom keyboard communities, with notable boards like the Rama M60 using the HHKB layout (albeit with a more symmetrical bottom row). Anyways I think it would be dope!
@Andrew_Wood You can remap our keyboards to make it follow that layout from a software perspective (I personally remap Caps Lock to Control as well). Windows PowerToys has a pretty powerful remapping utility, and I believe it’s straightforward in most Linux distros too. We’re investigating a firmware-level remapping option as well, but that is likely further in the future.
We probably won’t do HHKB artwork unless there is a lot of demand, but we do have blank keyboards.
Don’t forget spanish layouts! I’m in love with latinamerican layout for writing, but it’s such a pain to find a laptop with this layout on foreign markets.
matrix keyboard would be amazing.
or just make it easy to take the default keyboard out so we can at least place something like https://www.gboards.ca/product/gergo on top
Will ISO keyboard layouts be available or just American ANSI layouts? As far as I’m concerned so long as the buttons are in the ISO layout, everything else can be remapped in software. Swapping capslock and escape is my personal preference
About the windows logo and to become a neutral party between windows or Linux users. I think it will be better if the start button does not have any symbol attached (“Start” label only) like this one. Is this possible?
@Anil_Kulkarni we’ll likely have them available as individual modules by the time Batch 1 ships, but not as a configuration option for logistical reasons.
