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@ryo @PhenomX6 I used that as an example because the picture is good and includes the dock. There are more: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Trackpoint#Naming_and_brands

And I disagree on the keyboards. At least the keyboard on my ThinkPad is absolutely awful and I can barely type my password on it, and it's bad even by rubber dome standards. I have a shitty Microsoft rubber dome keyboard in my closet, from like, 15 years ago, and it's better than any laptop keyboard that I have ever used.

My position is that all laptop keyboards are complete shit, and they only got worse in terms of reliability. Hell, if anything, the horrible abominations made today, that feel like shit, are still a little easier to type on even if they do hurt more. But even on the old keyboards, the rubber domes felt like shit and the keycaps were flat, not sculpted.

The only exceptions are the few laptops out there that actually have mechanical keyboards. They exist, and they are generally pretty crazy. They may not have great switches (just Cherries or clones), but you can desolder them and replace them.I may build my own, though, just by building a ThinkPad into a briefcase.

Of course, I'm used to the nice keyboard I built, with box switches, but even this is lenient, because my own keyboard was a compromise based on cost and taxes. The previous points are not even considering the fact that almost all keyboards are bad in the first place. Even the keyboards with the best switches ever made, like the IBM beamspring keyboards, and the Model F, and others, even they still have the problem of crappy layouts. Keyboards to this day have layouts that were invented because of the mechanical limitations of early type writers, and that do not fit the human hand and fingers.

The only good keyboards that I can name at the moment are the Kinesis Advantage and the Dactyl Manuform (you build this one yourself with 3D printing, so you have to do that well for it to be good, I suppose), because they have those key wells along with the thumb clusters. That concave sculpting eliminates a lot of unnecessary finger movement, and keyboards like the Ergodox are shit because they don't have them. There's also the Maltron, which is kinda like the Kinesis, but it's not built nearly as well and I remember from my research that I just preferred the Kinesis (I don't have one yet, but I intend to get one, and maybe mod it, and it will probably be the II and not the 360, because of a review that I saw). Another one that may be exceptional is the DataHand, but it's very unusual, so it's difficult to know without trying, and it's kinda rare and fucking expensive, so to try one, I'll have to find a collector that owns one first. Here it is:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=IrRWTeJ0-Ow
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=T7UajuYCIyk

Of course, let's not even get into keyboard layouts. Nothing even remotely good comes with any OS by default. Qwerty is pantsu-on-head retarded, but at least it's default. Dvorak and Colemak are better, but still fucking retarded. WHY THE FUCK IS THE "A" KEY STILL IN THE SAME PLACE?! Jesus Christ, a really common letter, a vowel, under the fucking pinky. Anyway, I shouldn't rant about that, I should write a script that counts how many of each character is in my message logs, to see if it really is as retarded as it seems or if I'm just wrong. Pretty sure I'm not.

Anyway, switches are also a big topic. The best switches either aren't discrete or don't work on normal PCBs, so that's a problem. I have never owned linear switches, only clicky, but I wonder what typing on the is like, because hall effect switches are the most reliable switches that you can get (totally contactless), and they can also be analog, so I really wonder what moving the cursor would be like with those.

Like, maybe you could use your keyboard as a mouse much more effectively, since you could control the speed that the cursor moves. Hall effect switches use magnetic sensors to determine the distance of a magnet, and that is what actuates the switches. This can be calibrated however you want. The switches aren't soldered to the PCB, though, so you need special PCBs. Anyway, the Lisp Machine keyboards were known for using them, and actually, the Dreamcast analog thumbstick also did ( https://yewtu.be/watch?v=klhFkIsV-lE ), and was fully modular. There are no ergos that use them as far as I know, though. Oh, and there is an arcade stick that uses them too ( https://www.ultimarc.com/arcade-controls/joysticks/ultrastik-360-oval-top-clone/ ), that I would like to try because the engage distance can be changed, so that in combination with different gates could result in the most customizable design that you could possibly have, that is also absurdly reliable.

I might know too much. I'm suppressing my power level here. The world is not ready for my true and final form.

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