Command Classic

A series of keyboards designed and built by tsundoku.

Concept

The Tsundoku Keyboard is intended for a range of GUI environments that follow the general principles established by the Apple Macintosh. This broadly includes:

• Mac OS
• BeOS and Haiku
• NEXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Mac OS X (macOS)
• tsundoku's custom X11 environment

Prior Art

The keyboard design mostly derives from Apple layouts of the 1980s through the mid-1990s, before the AppleDesign keyboard made Apple's variant of the IBM AT Enhanced layout a de facto standard on the Mac platform.

• Escape on number row, left of 1 key
• R2 1.75U Control (left of A)
• Arrow keys on right side of bottom row - left, right, down, up
• No function keys
  • Not expected to be used often
  • Fn layer on number row enables them to be used when necessary
• Number pad that is always a number pad (no Num Lock)
• Large Command and Option keys

Antithesis

At risk of defining something by what it is not, it is worth contrasting the design from common archetypes.

IBM Enhanced Keyboard (Model M)

The Tsundoku Keyboard is in many ways an Apple user's rebellion against a mainstream dominated by descendants of this keyboard. Our objections:

• Caps Lock occupying a prominent position even though it is rarely used
• Control in bottom left corner even though it is frequently used
• Escape is far away from the main bank
• Empty space on bottom row (between Control and Alt)
  • 104 keyboards from the Windows 95 era onward fill this space with additional keys, but they are small to fit into this space
• Num Lock
  • The number pad doubles up as a navigation cluster
  • Vestige of earlier IBM PC keyboard layouts without a dedicated nav cluster

Happy Hacking Keyboard

• Command key positions are identical
• Larger Option key instead of leaving blank space on bottom row
• Arrow keys
• Fn on bottom left instead of taking a piece of of right Shift
  • A JIS right Shift doing this would be reduced to 0.75U

Compromises

• (JIS only) No 英数 key left of spacebar
  • 3.5U spacebars unavailable. Would need to be custom made
  • Use slightly more common 4.5U spacebar

• IBM style number pad operator keys
  • Mac-style operators would require custom keycaps
  • IBM style operator keys are not particularly objectionable

National Variants

• JIS
• ANSI
• UK

Design Goals

• • Large Command and Option keys for people who use them often
• Not minimalist
  • Dedicated arrow keys
  • Coincidentally smaller than 101/104 keyboards, but compactness itself is not a goal
• No IBM-style nav cluster
  • Arrow keys can go on the bottom row as on many Apple keyboards
  • Home/End/PageUp/PageDown on Fn layer of arrow keys
• Has a tenkey
  • No Num Lock (no modes!). Always numbers

Problems with existing PCBs

Reasons why the Tsundoku Keyboard must be designed from scratch.

• No JIS Right Shift support
• Layouts all referenced from AT101/Windows 104
  • 75%, 60%, etc... all expressed as reductions of AT101
  • No consideration for different combinations of elements. Tenkeyless? 75% 60%? What about a tenkey but no IBM nav cluster?