Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
A keyboard, especially a mechanical one with a metal backplate, has both volume and significant weight to it. Shipping even the smallest item from a U.S.-based eBay seller to Israel will normally cost me no less than $10, and even $15 at times, and that with regular USPS first class airmail without tracking.
Even the $28.71 charged by Massdrop on shipping this keyboard to Israel seems reasonable to me, even more so when compared to the $50+ charged by, say, Unicomp, to ship something similar here direct.
The percentage of the actual item price is irrelevant here. Keyboards weigh and take up a lot of space, both factors that always drive shipping costs high.
My 2 cents' worth (and no, I'm not affiliated with Massdrop).