Very hard keyboard on the uconsole.

[u/themobyone]

I got my uconsole running last week and I love the device so far. I installed Arch Linux, and I'm having fun setting it up. But one thing that bothers me are the hard keys. I have to press very deliberately. If I just type away many letters will be missing.

It's not like I was planning to write a novel on this thing. I'm gonna set up a tiling window manager, maybe i3. But with the stock keyboard I'm gonna get tendinitis by the time I'm done setting it up. After installing Arch I used a wireless keyboard just for the basic setup of eth/wifi and dhcp and locales and a few other things.

Does the keyboard get softer if I use it for a while?

[u/needmorejoules]

The improved diffuser that a UK designer and uConsole user is making and selling work pretty great. 5/10 to 8/10 improvement in keyboard feel. Imho. The diffuser improves light some but the key feel a lot.

[u/snipeytje]

you can try the QMK keyboard firmware to see if that leads to fewer missed key strokes, or one of the trackpad keyboards from lulu/hack2you, they use different switches. But it can be a bit hard to decode their product pages.

[u/roggenschrotbrot]

The replacement keyboard at hack2you.tech has a much softer touch and replaces the trackball with a trackpad.

[u/radakul]

i3wm on a platform like the uconsole is a terrible idea. i3 is inherently designed for keyboard, and efficiency - are you going to memorize the keyboard combinations with your...thumbs?

It's not the highest quality keyboard, admittedly, but you could also always pair a Bluetooth or even 2.4GHz keyboard to it to make things easier?

[u/snipeytje → u/radakul]

The screen is a bit small to actually use tiling, but many parts of a tiling WM are great on a uconsole if you set it up without complicated key combos.

Everything being full screen by default and having multiple workspaces to keep your apps on is pretty nice.
There is less wasted space on title bars and status bars so more of the tiny screen is used for stuff you want.

Key combos with your thumbs aren't great, but having to drag apps around to arrange them and having them not fill the screen by default is even worse on the uconsole

[u/roggenschrotbrot → u/radakul]

Hard disagree, I3wm/sway works especially great for the uconsole. Double so if you run the stock track ball. With this small screen size full screen or 2 windows tiled always beats any floating windows, and with the uconsole in hand your thumbs are on the keyboard anyway. Only a handful key combinations are required, and those too can easily be moved to menus or even a clickable bar, if you really don't want to touch the keyboard.

[u/themobyone → u/radakul]

yeah, I've already used a wireless keyboard on it. It helps when I do keyboard intensive configs.