the:chris:walker ↩

WASD Custom Keycaps

Mar 9, 2018

I treated myself.

I have been eyeing WASD keyboards for ages. But the price, with shipping to the UK and import duty was a bit silly. I cracked though, made my layout, chose my colours and…

Full album with more pics on Google Photos.

Lots of people talk about how bad the WASD keycaps are. But you simply cannot buy a totally custom keycap set like this anywhere else. The things I customised specifically, apart from the colours, were:

I added small numerals to the number row (that one I always miss when touchtyping).
The modifier keys all have custom text, the spacebar has the thechriswalker branding.
The the number pad is all binary and psuedo assembly instructions (div, mul, ret…)
The Esc key has the glider on it.
HJKL have arrows on them.

Of course I did get some things wrong… I would change a couple of things.

The grey on black was too low contrast. I wanted low, but this was too low, a slightly lighter grey would have been better. Same for the orange chevrons on the HJKL keys, the orange is too similar to the key color, would have looked better in dark grey.

The numpad was a mistake. I decided the grey keys would look nice, but I didn’t change the color of the labels in the layout SVG. So they ended up with the text the same color as the keys. That’s way to little contrast.

Otherwise I am happy and those little niggles don’t detract from how awesome I think the keyboard looks now.

Maybe it is about time I fixed my Ergodox and started using that…

thechriswalker lives in Exeter, UK with his wife: Rosie, son: Orson and daughter: Florence. He likes bacon, drinks too much coffee, doesn't like spiders and enjoys solving problems. He'll use Vi over Emacs and doesn't usually talk about himself in the third person.

Code Monkey by trade, I like writing daemons and systems software. Preferably in Go. I've written a bunch of variable-quality stuff, all of which lives on Github.

If you want to get in touch, throw me an email.

Also, I am definitely now a qualified professional wood-hole-was-used-to-create-fire-recognitionist, which is totally a thing and will likely make me a billionaire in the future. So if you have some wood with a hole in it and want to know if that hole was created in the process of attempting to light a fire, then I'm your man.