I split my keyboard in half

Well, it finally happened. I cut my keyboard in half and now it’s hard to go back. This is a story/review of the Silakka54 keyboard, why I chose it, and how my first weeks have been with it.

What is a Silakka54

The Silakka54 is a keyboard you can literally download off github. It has 54 keys split into two boards (27 per side) and uses the RP2040 with QMK as the base.

That is the 10,000ft overview, but don’t worry, I’ll go a little more in-depth.

Where I found it

I got the keyboard off AliExpress. You can absolutely build one yourself, download the schematics off Github, have the board printed by some company like PCBway and solder the parts… but I’m nowhere near good enough with a soldering iron, so I bought one with red Cherry switches. This is not going to be a build post, sorry. You can find the how-to on Squalius’ Github, though, and if you do, more power to you.

Why choose a split keyboard

In my job, I do quite a lot of typing, and lately, my back has been getting a little too rounded for my taste and I found that if I want to survive, I need to try something other than my usual tenkeyless keyboard.

The keyboards available for this use-case range from keyboards that just split the letters and push them a little bit apart on one board to supercute minimalist Planck keyboards. These would not solve my back issue and make typing a little more comfortable, but I really wanted to take the plunge. This is why I went for the split keyboard. My requirements for what I wanted to try were as follows:

• A split design: The boards have to be detached (two separate boards connected together)
• Ortholinear setup (to be explained later)
• Staggered columns
• Not too few keys

Requirement 1: Split design (easy)

These have lately gone up in number and setups, it seems. You can just search Github for a split keyboard and you’ll stumble into one eventually. If you really want to compare and contrast, I can recommend the Awesome split keyboards Github repo for some designs you can buy or make yourself. If I can recommend one, it would be either the Silakka or Corne.

Requirement 2: Ortholinear setup

To explain the ortholinear trend, I ask you to look at your keyboard (phone or laptop). If you did not hop on this bandwagon, you may notice your keyboard has the rows offset by some distance, the Q key is up and to the left of the A key, T and G are the same, etc. This is in memoriam of typewriter keyboards which had to make space for their mechanisms (going from the key to a hammer). You couldn’t have the keys directly above and below or your levers wouldn’t fit. This is no longer an issue, everything is connected by wires, and these can run over/under one another.

If you want to imagine an ortholinear keyboard, just picture a perfect square grid. One great example is the Planck. If your fingers have to reach a row above or below, there is no sideways movement necessary, you can just extend your finger and your key is right under the finger. Perfect, right? Not really, because your fingers are not all the same length (and if they are, I am sorry about your accident.) This flows nicely into the next point:

Requirement 3: Staggered columns

Once your keys are placed in a perfect grid, you can really start to have fun: Since my fingers are all different lengths, my pinky will never be in the same position as my middle finger. To combat this, keyboard designers and hobbyists stagger columns instead of rows. Basically what that means is that you extend your fingers and place them down. The ASDF keys (usually found under your left hand) are moved so that A is directly under your pinky, the S under your ring finger, and so on until your keys are under your fingers. Then each row is curved the same, with the 3EDC column being the highest-placed, and your 1QAZ column is the closest to the heel of your palm. Some keyboards are more staggered than others and people even design custom stagger levels for their hands, but usually any stagger is better than no stagger at all.

Requirement 4: Not too few keys

If you didn’t look at the Github site above, you may think there’s no way to remove too many keys. The F keys? Sure, maybe. The numberpad? Sure. The arrow keys? Well that may be a little too much.

Oh boy, how wrong you are. I have seen 18-key keyboards, and I feel like that may be a little too few. The Corne keyboard has 46 keys in total. The silakka54 has… 54 keys. This makes these keyboards 50% or less (a full-sized keyboard has 108-ish keys). Where do we put these keys if we don’t have them? Layers.

My requirement for not too few keys is simple: If I’m going to go this route, I don’t want to have a learning curve that takes months to scramble up. I really wanted a way to not use too many layers and still have most of what I need right under my fingers.

What the hell are layers?

If you’ve used a normal keyboard, you may think you have no layers on your keyboard. However, consider this: Your shift key changes your lowercase keys to uppercase. It also changes numbers to symbols, the semicolon to a colon, and don’t get me started on the Alt keys! These are all examples of layers your regular keyboard knows. One way you can visualize it is by looking at your phone keyboard: You have regular keys, but there is a dedicated symbols key. If you press that, your keys change and letters turn to symbols. This is what I have on my own keyboard.

The beauty of these split keyboards is the fact that by moving stuff to layers, you can minimize finger movement. No longer do I have to go all the way to the number pad to type numbers, or to the top of my arrow keys just to press Delete. Using a keyboard firmware called QMK, you can modify any keyboard which supports it to place keys exactly where you want them to.

How I set up my layers

When I went for the Silakka54, I had to say goodbye to all the F-keys on top of the keyboard. No arrow keys, no delete key, no print-screen by default. I had something that’s less than a laptop keyboard.

There are some keys I can do without and I put those to work immediately: No CapsLock key means I can only use Shift, but I don’t miss it that much. What I missed were arrow keys. These are easy to add, so if I hold down a key, I go into the “Navigation layer.” This is similar to vim’s layout, only shifted by one, so J is left, K is up, L is down, and semicolon moves right. I hold down a key on the right side of the keyboard and my left gives me arrow keys.

This is not enough, however, QMK can emulate mouse movements and clicks as well! So on my left hand, I have the same layout mirrored and this moves the mouse. F for right, D for up, etc. You get the idea. So now my movement is one one layer. That’s fine, but what about F-keys? I need them to press F1 for help, F5 to refresh pages, and let’s not forget the most important cheat code for games: Alt-F4! These are on the other layer.

The perceptive may notice that a layer with 8 special keys leaves about 46 keys each on the table. I put the rest of my navigation keys on the navigation layer (Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, etc.) and the F-key layer has number keys on the home row. These are on the default layer as well, but hey, I want them closer.

There are hours of videos and books written on the way you can set up QMK, so I will not go into detail, but it’s all about progressive tuning. What I started with a few weeks ago was only the beginning, and I assume that next month, the layout will be slightly different.

The split life

The keyboard was surprisingly easy to start with. I lost some speed, but not nearly as much as if I switched to a different keyboard layout (like Colemak or Dvorak). I dropped from around 80WPM to 44WPM on the first day, moving up to 55 on the second day. This is a word a second, and I can say that with my thinking speed, my fingers are faster than my thoughts. It’s not as bad as I thought, but some quality-of-life improvements like a Shift-Esc combo. This is where the keyboard really shines, the firmware itself can recognize the difference between a tap and a hold. I only hold my shift key to type uppercase, so it’s basically useless as a tap key. Why not bind the “tap of the Shift key” to be Escape? There are software tools to do this (I’ve used Xcape for a long while), but this is device-specific. With QMK, no matter which computer I use, I can always rely on my Shift key to tap-send the Escape key.

The split nature of the keyboard allows me to put my hands further apart, and thanks to this, I now sit with my chest open and back pain is almost gone. Sure, I have to lug around two parts of a keyboard to be able to use it (I only bought one, so I have to use the same at home and at work), but that is a small price to pay in exchange for this specific benefit.

Another thing I can point out to people is the fact that this keyboard (as made on Aliexpress) is hot-swappable