I recently got a #MNTReform keyboard, V3 variant.
Overall, I like it a lot!
The keys have a nice responsive feel and are slightly clicky with brown switches. The shape of the keys is just plain nice in some subtle way...
The backlight cannot turn completely off, but it can get quite dim. Someone was poking at that issue the other day, so maybe that will be fixable!
That said, I do have some opinions, mainly about some of the key size and placement, this is a keyboard after all!
1/3
The strange thing to me was the choice to use a 1.5x key for the right arrow, left alt, and circle keys. All would benefit from leaving a small gap at the edge of the row to navigate to the corners by feel. The alt key being the same size as the two keys around it also make it harder to sense by feel.
I sometimes struggle to hit the backspace or enter keys
correctly, but probably will adapt over time.
I could do without the delete or function keys...
Nothing is really a deal breaker!
2/3
This hardware is about as open as it comes, so *obviously* I could just make my own keyboard...
I will add it to my long list of someday, maybe, probably honestly never, projects!
It works quite good enough. :)
https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform/-/tree/master/reform2-keyboard3-pcb
3/3
@vagrantc What's your take on now only having one button between the space bars instead of the two "alt" buttons that the original keyboard had? I remapped one of the alt buttons to backspace and the left spacebar to "enter" so that my thumbs get to do more things than just idling around. Unfortunately they will have one key less to press with keyboard v3...
@josch the two little buttons in the middle of the spacebar were something I learned to live with; I think I remapped them to pageup and pagedown, but honestly, I vastly prefer the newer more traditional layout as something I do not probably need to customize much, if at all.