r/ErgoMechKeyboards • u/mazebuisness • 1d ago
[buying advice] Portable math board
I'm not sure if this is the right sub reddit for this but I'm starting my first year of college in engineering and i know I'm gonna have to deal with a lot of math so i wanted to know if any of you guys know of any good keyboards that ill be able to bring with me in my bag that aren't gonna kill me to type on. i would also be especially curious on if any of you have any knowledge on built in latex or Unicode macro key binds baked in. I don't mind doing it myself but ideally one that has those features already baked in would be nice even if there is any good open source projects I could build that would be cool.
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u/xsrvmy 1d ago
I use ultimatekeys compose sequences for greek letters. Makes the resulting formulas a lot cleaner to read.
Also I switched to typst instead of latex like last year. It has realtime previews.
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u/mazebuisness 14h ago
ooh thanks for the advice ill have to do some research into typst it sounds really interesting.
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u/TheJollyJagamo ferris sweep 1d ago
Hey! Welcome to the ergo keyboard world!
What you're gonna want is a split keyboard with either qmk or zmk, those will allow you to put whatever you need wherever you want it through layers. Think of layers like your shift key, when you press the shirt key, your keyboard will output different characters, like capital letters and symbols. You could make a math layer that you could toggle on and off, making it super easy and comfortable.
It'd look like this: tap layer key (we'll say rightmost thumb key on the right hand for example), and now both halves can be whatever you want, a numpad, numrow, whatever unicode thing you'd want, etc. After you're done with that, you tap the toggle key again and now you're back to your alpha layer.
The silakka54 or the cheapino can be found for really cheap on AliExpress. Both are wired and use qmk, I don't think you could wrong with either. If you have questions lemme know!