After 6 years of daily use, my Redox keyboard died on me. I originally thought of getting a new Redox, maybe the wireless version. I eventually decided to get a ZSA Voyager. It had good reviews, and less keys. After a few years of tweaking my Redox layout, I wasn’t using its top row anymore.
I went with Kailh Choc Brown switches. Although I wasn’t 100% sure it’d be the right choice, Voyager switches are easily swappable so I figured I could always change it later. It turned out to be the tactile switches I needed. I may still change some of the switches for my mod keys, but that can wait.
ZSA’s support was stellar. Responsive, helpful, attentive, no predefined replies. It was one of the best customer experiences I’ve experienced in the past few years. On top of that, they really nailed the onboarding experience. I received multiple emails in the days after my order. These emails helped me get ready to switch to the new keyboard. They familiarized me with its options and answered any questions I had before I even thought to ask them.
Here is my new layout (you can also view it in the Oryx keyboard configurator tool):
I originally tried to use the home row a lot more, but it wasn’t working well for me. I would constantly miss key taps or mods because of a too quick keypress. The end result is quite standard, and I think it works well.
As you can see on the heatmap above, my home row sees quite a lot of use! The Colemak layout helps a lot with this, and I placed all symbols on the home row in my second layer:
Combining Cmd and the backspace key also proved to be a good idea 🙂
If you have any tips on how I could improve that layout further, do not hesitate to let me know! I’m still not entirely happy with my ( [ { } ] ) placement, but I haven’t found a better way to quickly access those yet.
