tag · layout

#layout

6 articles tagged #layout.

Every #layout piece

Five keyboard case silhouettes drawn in warm-grey stroke, arranged left to right from 60% up to full-size, each adding back one key cluster, with an amber measuring bracket beneath marking the width each size gives back to the desk.

Keyboard layout sizes, compared: 60% to full-size, which fits your desk

60%, 65%, 75%, TKL, full-size — the names read like a settled taxonomy, but each cut trades away a specific cluster of keys for a specific amount of desk space. Here's what a reader actually keeps and gives up at each size, and how a firmware layer changes the math.

thockAug 22, 20268 min read

An annotated top-down strip of a keyboard's bottom two rows, drawn in warm-grey stroke, with the Enter key and Left Shift key outlined and labeled in amber to show where ANSI, ISO, and JIS physical layouts diverge.

Guides

ANSI, ISO, or JIS: a practical layout buying guide

Two boards can look nearly identical in a listing photo and still take entirely different keycap sets. Here's how to read Enter key shape, bottom-row widths, and spec-sheet shorthand before ordering — not after a set arrives that doesn't fit.

thockAug 15, 20269 min read

Line-drawing comparison of five keyboard case silhouettes shrinking left to right — full-size with numpad, tenkeyless, 75%, 65%, and 60% — arranged like a family tree with a bronze accent dot marking the 60% case as the root the other compact sizes branch from.

Deep Dives

How the 60% became the default custom-keyboard layout

Every custom-keyboard buyer's guide since the mid-2010s opens with the same four-term vocabulary — 60%, 65%, 75%, TKL — as though it always existed. It didn't. One open-source PCB out of a geekhack thread is most of the reason that taxonomy exists at all.

thockJul 29, 202611 min read

Top-down line silhouette of an Alice-layout keyboard, drawn in a single warm-grey stroke with a dusty-rose splash washing one cluster and a single brass-accent keycap on the right home row.

Trends

The slow fade of Alice layouts

Alice mounts had a clear moment between 2021 and 2023 — the splayed alphas, the angled bar, the promise of a typing posture that didn't twist your wrists. The thock trends snapshot for 2026-W19 pegs Alice movement at -18 and trending down. The layout still has loyal users, but the curve has bent.

thockMay 5, 20265 min read

Trends

How 75 percent became the default custom layout

Two years ago a custom-board recommendation defaulted to 65% with a polite note about 75% as the next step up. The KBD75 v3's staying power as a default recommendation, the QK75, and a crowded mid-tier have flipped that order. 75% is now the layout customs reach for first.

thockApr 24, 20265 min read

Ideas

Parts pairing for a split build: two independent halves, two independent decisions

A split board is two keyboards that happen to share a keymap. Most builders still buy parts for it like it's one — matching switches, ordering a single sculpted keycap set, and never touching the left half's tuning differently from the right's.

thockAug 26, 20269 min read

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