The Osprette

There's no such thing as endgame, but the Osprette is as close as I've gotten so far. With 2 thumb keys on each side, strong pinky stagger, and a comfortable 50 degree angle between the halves, this has all of the cool features of a state-of-the-art unibody ergo keeb. But the big difference that puts this bird on the fringe are the migrated keys on its fringes: the outer top pinky keys are now on the "sixth" column.

But why, you ask? Why send them to the corner for timeout? I unfortunately find that no matter how low I put the pinky columns, I can never quite access those keys without my whole arm moving (at least) a little, which is not the case for any of the other keys on most 34-key boards. Taking inspiration from Brow's Balbuzard, the movement of these keys to the outsides of the pinky columns keeps every key within a comfortable reach.

The one (arguable) weakness of this approach is that the bigrams (read: subsequent keys) from Q to W and O to P on QWERTY-based layouts will be more awkward than you're used to, but I think it's worth the trade-off.

• the PCB
• diodes
• reset switch
• power switch
• bumpons

You can find QMK config here and ZMK config in the main repo of ZMK. The source for this board can be found here.

There is also a build guide made by a friend here.

Cases are available here.