I borrowed a preonic which got me interested with the orthographic layout. The custom keyboard rabbit hole drew me in, and a friend was planning on doing a ferris sweep build, so I started reducing my keymap to try it out.

Being able to do it in stages helped with trying out and committing to a 34 key layout. Looking back it wasn’t that bad and my advice to someone who doesn’t have an intermediate step to borrow or budget for additional keyboards is to just jump in.

I’ve been using my 34 key ferris sweep for a couple of years now and I love it.

I have a charybdis nano that I need to wire up, it makes me really appreciate the tighter choc spacing on the sweep, that and the low profile keys are doing a lot for comfort IMO