Keyboard Nirvana

The 3-month Journey for a perfect keyboard has led me here, customizing both the innovative FrogPad and TypeMatrix Keyboards in a way that visually expresses their intrinsic awesomeness.

The TypeMatrix and The FrogPad are both miracles of "engineering done right" , light and super portable. The whole process has ended up teaching me so much about input devices and Windows automation and I finally,truly Grok It. A Maltron Keyboard is the Holy Grail of Keyboards, and Windows does only one keyboard remap for all
attaced keyboards but thanks to an advanced type correction word list, any mismatched key layout gibberish resolves to words after hitting Space. This must drive any keylogger crazy! It allows for obfuscation also so people don't shoulder-surf you or see a word before Commit is pressed.

Shifted up One Row

So I reclaimed the F-Key Row for numbers (Esc shifts numbers to F-Keys as a modifier) to allow the super-useful sub-alphanumeric Matched Symbol Row that the Maltron Contoured Keyboard provides:
( [ { -_ =+] } ) (with <, >. also on some models) -Balanced!

F-Keys that often used were lowered F2 rename / F4 path+closewin / F5 reload+find / F8 replace (in TextPad)

F6 hop active panes / F11 fullscreen moved up out of the center


Esc is moved down one, and used to shift the symbols (made primary for coding) to numbers. The FrogPad is still a superb dedicated NumPad as well as a full keyboard to itself

I flipped Right Alt / Ctrl to match the left side. KeyTweak (used for TypeMatrix boards) can be used to remap the relocated keys in the registry.


The FrogPad however, sharing the same SW keymap, is thrown off because windows does not have the ability to support multiple keyboard layouts (it lumps them all together as one keyboard)

I wrote a short remap script that is toggled by the caps lock key, (For Frog Use Only)

and alternate solution:
word-replace filter that corrects for the incorrect characters being sent due to the remap (15,000 word permutations, gathered from my chats and emails over the last 10 years)

e.g.
"<-can become - "Keyboarding" -> can become -> ">y=euacim.f "

... the correct word is dropped in when you hit Space. Hey, it's Kludgy, but quite fast on a 2GHz PC due to AutoHotKey's Awesomeness
When I type BFE it launches my keyboard.ahk script, for customization.

Ergo Maltron Key Caps

Finalized Tosh-Pad

The Last Ergo Mod