 A couple of years ago I bought my first programmable mechanical keyboard and I fell in love with it. That keyboard was the Ergo Dox Easy which is put out by ZSA. I've done a couple of videos about the Ergo Dox and I still use this keyboard on a daily basis. It's my keyboard for my home computer at home. As you can see it's a split keyboard design. It's got thumb clusters, six keys on each thumb cluster and it's just a better way to type, much more efficient because I mean you have two thumbs while on a normal keyboard, there are those two thumbs responsible for exactly one key, that gigantic spacebar. It makes no sense. This just makes more sense to me. So I love the Ergo Dox so much that when I moved into this office I needed a split keyboard for this office and I thought about just buying a second Ergo Dox. But you know ZSA makes a couple of other keyboards and one of them is the Moonlander Mark 1. So I bought the Moonlander for the office and the Moonlander is very similar to the Ergo Dox. I can actually show you the Moonlander here on camera. This is the Moonlander is what I use here at the office on a daily basis. But the other day I realized ZSA actually puts out another keyboard. It is not a split keyboard but I thought it was really interesting. So I wanted to check out the Plank Easy. So I purchased one and the reason I purchased this even though it's not a split keyboard and it probably isn't something I'd use on a daily basis like to do work in as far as like sitting in front of my workstation here. What I love about this keyboard is how tiny this thing is. So this is a 40% keyboard and I thought man this would be great for like a small carrying bag or just something that's portable you can take with you anywhere and have your programmable keyboard that you've set up to your own layout and everything like that. So I bought one and when I got this thing in the mail the other day I almost left because of how small this thing is you know not having a 40% keyboard previously this is my first 40%er. I didn't realize how small these things were. This is the box and of course the keyboard is smaller than the box because the box has got some extra padding. It had a cable and some other tools in it. Here is my Samsung Galaxy 10 phone. I don't know if you guys because that's a good comparison. But the keyboard seriously is just a little bit bigger than my cell phone. So this is actually the keyboard plugged in. Here's my phone. That is kind of crazy right. I was just blown away by how small this thing is. Now let me briefly talk about what it's in the box other than just the keyboard itself. It comes with some extra keycaps. So you have four extra keycaps. Two of them are just blank keycaps. And then you also have a F and a J keycap if you want to swap out the F and J on the keyboard because the ones that ship with the keyboard have that raised little bump on them at the bottom for you touch typists to let you know that you are actually on the F and J. But if you want a smooth F and J, which you definitely would want one, especially if you're not using a QWERTY layout, right? It doesn't make sense to have those raised keys. Here is a smooth F and J. Then you have a USB adapter here. This is a USB to a USB-C adapter so you can plug in this USB-C cord, which then plugs into the back of the Plank Easy. Now the cord that it ships with, my one complaint with the Plank Easy so far has been this cord. This cord is a two foot long cord. And that is just not enough cord to get to anywhere. For example, my tower, my workstation here at the office. It's a big tower. And all the USB ports that I have to plug this thing into are near the top of this tower that is two and a half feet tall, right? Two foot cord, two and a half foot tall tower. I can't plug this thing in and actually have this sitting on the desk, even if it was right in front of the tower, it's still too short of a cord to even do that. So luckily on the ErgoDocs and on the Moonlander, they ship with much longer USB-C cord. So I just unplugged my Moonlander, the USB-C cord that came with it, which is like a four foot long one, and plugged it into the Plank for purposes of this video here. Now let's talk about some of my first impressions when I first took this thing out of the box. When I first took it out of the box, it wasn't plugged in or anything, so no lights or anything, but even just without the lighting and everything, I thought this was one sexy keyboard. This thing is gorgeous. It's perfectly symmetrical, ortho-linear design, and by ortho-linear, I mean truly ortho-linear, horizontally and vertically, everything is in a perfect grid. And this is a 47 key keyboard. So these 40% keyboards are typically either 47 key or 48 key, depending on how they do the spacebar. You can see that the Plank has a double key cap for the spacebar, so we get 47 keys instead of the 48. Now if I'm being honest, I think I would have rather them ship this as a 48 key keyboard and actually split that spacebar into two keys, because then for me, coming from the Moonlander and the ErgoDocs, it makes much more sense, because now my thumbs could actually control two different keys each, you know, that key and then whatever the key that was split here, and then the next thumb could operate these next two keys, so it almost would operate exactly like the Moonlander, but unfortunately they didn't do that and I can't split it up into two keys because there's only one switch that is actually in the center of that double key key cap. The next thing you notice when you plug the keyboard in, let me go ahead and plug in the Plank, it makes some noises, right? When you get some beeps and some noises, they call these things Game Boy-style sounds or whatever, so it's kind of more for the gaming crowd and of course more for the gaming crowd as well with the RGB lighting, and this is very similar actually to both the ErgoDocs and the Moonlanders versus the RGB lighting, you can adjust how dim or how bright the lighting is, you can adjust the colors and everything like that. So I was really impressed with how slick, how small, how beautiful this keyboard was when I first got it, but then I started looking at it and when I started looking at this keyboard, I realized something, I wasn't sure that I could actually use this thing because it was missing some keys, I knew it was gonna be a small keyboard, but it was missing keys that I wasn't really expecting it to actually be missing. So if I go back to the desk here, let me unplug this thing. So we have this 47 key keyboard, there is one shift key, you have the left shift, you don't actually have a right shift over here where you would expect it, just one shift key by default. Now of course we can change that. We also had one control key and that control key was actually here originally, so you only had the left control, you didn't have a right control. I'm not used to that. Every keyboard I've ever used, including the ErgoDocs and the Moonlander have two shift keys by default and two control keys by default. And I'm so used to being able to use either hand to operate shift and control, just having one, I knew that wasn't gonna be an option for me. I would have to completely, totally change the way I type, relearn typing basically to do that. So I knew I was gonna have to play with the layout. And the great thing about the Plank Easy and the Moonlander and the ErgoDocs, all three of them, is that the Plank guys, they have this tool called the Oryx tool and this is so you can change the default layouts for, in this case this is actually, we're looking at the Moonlander here, but let me go to the default layout for the Plank Easy. So this is the default layout for the Plank Easy. You have four layers, you have what they call the base layer here. And again, just the one shift key, the one control key, the alt key, and then you have the meta key or the super key or the windows key, the command key. And I didn't like this either in the default layout. Super should be on the other side of alt, right? They're out of order. So that was another thing I knew was gonna throw me off a little bit. And then you have these hold keys and these are actually a hold to lower, hold to raise. What this does is if you hold to lower, you go to a lower layer and here you have your special characters and you have your function keys. And then if you hold to raise, you go to the raise layer where you get your number keys, some function keys again, page up, page down, things like that. So you have three different layers. Well, actually you have four different layers because if you hold both of the hold keys, so to raise and lower at the same time, you have this layer here called adjust, which just has some audio stuff. So some media key stuff and your settings as far as the RGB lighting. So you're gonna adjust the lighting. So I knew that I was gonna have some issues with this layout. So what I did is I actually tried to make this thing as like my moon lander as I could as far as the various layers and the various layouts. If I switch back over to the keyboard here, I knew that I didn't like just having the left shift. I wanted a right shift. Of course, where right shift would normally be, that is the enter key. Well, the great thing about the oryx configurator, and you can do this with the plank, the moon lander or the ergo docs, is you can actually have these keys have dual functions, meaning when I tap the key, it's one thing. When I hold the key, it's something else. So let me actually switch over to my layout. So this is the layout I've been working on here the last few days. So what I did is I have my left shift key, which was just the way it was out of the box. When you hold, that is left shift. But the enter key, I changed this. The enter key now, when you tap it, it's enter. But when you hold it, that's right shift. So now I actually have both my left and right shift. And then control, what I did is I moved control, which was here, which is kind of a weird spot for it, because it was gonna conflict with where I wanted the super key. So I moved left control to Z, because this is actually the way it is by default in the ergo docs and the moon lander, is that Z, when you tap it, is Z. When you hold it though, it's left control. And then to get right control, slash. When you tap it, it's slash. When you hold it, it's right control. The other thing I didn't like, if I go back to the default layout, is I didn't like the hold to lower and hold to raise keys right on the other side of that space bar. I mean, it kind of makes sense, because it's right there. Your thumbs are operating the space bar and they can quickly operate the lower and raise keys as well. But the problem I had is on my moon lander, if I go back to the moon lander here, the keys to actually move to different layers on the moon lander are actually the outer keys, not the keys on the inside, they're actually all the way out. So that's what I wanted to do again, for consistency's sake. I decided on my layout to actually move hold to lower on the far left, so I can hit it with the pinky and then hold to raise on the far right. But other than that, I put the super key in the correct spot on the other side of the alt. And then let's talk about when I hold to lower. So if I go to my lower layer, this is not what the lower layer looks out of the box. Let's actually talk about what it looks like by default. By default, you get your special character. So these are one through zero shifted, right? And then you have your functions, F1 through six and then F7 through F12, some non-US stuff, home and end keys. I don't normally use the media keys. I never use media keys for anything. So a lot of this I didn't like. For one thing, I didn't like having the special characters here because this could have just been one through zero, in my opinion. So because I can hit both the button to lower the layer and the shift key, which is right above it at the same time to actually shift one through zero to all of these keys. So I don't specifically need these to be these keys because I can always just shift to them if that makes sense. So in my lower layer, I changed them back to one through zero. And then if I want the special characters, what I would do is I would hit the lower key and then shift and then one through zero to get the exclamation point, the at symbol and all of that. If I wanted an even quicker way to do that, since I had some extra keys to play with because I got rid of all the function keys as well on this layer, here are those special characters like the special character for one exclamation is right under it. And you can see one through six and then seven through zero are right here. And then I also added the caps lock and num lock even though I never used them just in case they accidentally get turned on sometimes because that does happen. I wanna be able to turn them off. So I needed to have these mapped somewhere just in case I ever needed them. The other thing I wanted was I didn't want just one through zero at the top of the keyboard. We also need a proper keypad because sometimes especially when you're doing quick calculations and things I like having like a 10 key keypad. So I actually added zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine of course is already here. So it just made sense to add this num pad here along with all the functions for multiplication, division plus and then I got the period, the equal sign and the delete key. So I could delete what I was typing quickly. Now let's talk about the raised layer. So if I go back to the default layout for the plank they have the raised layer and the raised layer is one through zero but since I did that on the lower layer I won't need these anymore. So what I did is they had the function keys on both layers. I don't know why you need F1 through F12 on both the lower layer and the raised layer and the function keys are not keys you hit that often. So I changed the raised layer quite a bit. So I went ahead and added F1 through F11 at the top F12 right here. And then I wanted the special characters for programming, scripting. So we're talking about parentheses, braces and brackets. So I've got parentheses, braces and brackets. I also added page up and page down. I do occasionally use those. I have the home key and the end key here as well even though I never use them. Some of the other really common keys you use are plus and equals and I do have the equals here. And of course, if you shift that, that becomes a plus. So that is on the raised layer and that's very easy to hit, right? Because I just hit this key on the base layer and then equals and also have the tilde symbol. We have the backspace. And of course, if I shift that that becomes the pipe symbol. One of the things I did with my layout compared to the default layout the planks default layout, it's separated the unshifted and shifted versions of everything. Like one through zero was on one layer and then the shifted version of it was on another layer. Just to save space, it didn't make sense for me to separate all of that on different layers when I can just shift everything and shift the slash to a pipe symbol. For example, where they have it split up the pipe symbols on the lower layer and then the slash is on the raised layer. Just for consistency sake, because I'm used to shifting all of those special characters. Anyway, even on the ArgoDocs and the Moonlander I didn't divide them up like that. And because of me doing this, I save on a ton of space. I don't even need all these layers. I've got four layers. I actually added a fifth layer but I didn't do anything with it. It's just an empty layer at this point. But I actually don't even use these four keys here or these 12 keys here on this third layer. So almost everything I do here I was on the base layer, the lower layer I added keys for everything. But on the raised layer I'm only using about half the keys. So even though it's only a 47 key keyboard it's plenty of space for me because I can always just shift a lot of that to actually get the other characters rather than trying to split all of the characters up in the unshifted versus the shifted version of those keys. So let's briefly talk about how you compile your new keyboard layout and flash it to your keyboard. So on the browser here you see the yellow button that says compile this layout so you change all the keys to fit whatever keyboard layout you wanna create here and then click on compile this layout and it will download a file to your computer. So in Linux typically it's gonna download that to your downloads folder. So then after you have that file it's gonna end in .bin.bin. Then what you wanna do is you wanna install a program called Wally. I use Wally-CLI which is the command line version of Wally. And let me zoom in here and then all I would do is I would CD into my downloads directory. I did it LS, let me hit enter. I've got Plank, Easy, Glow, yada, yada, yada.bin. Then I would do Wally-CLI and then just give it the full path to that bin file and hit enter. And then it's gonna say press reset button of your keyboard. It's gonna keep annoying you to press the button the reset button on your keyboard. What is the reset button? Now if I turn the keyboard over here let me see if I can get this on camera but there is a little pinhole right here on the keyboard and by pinhole I mean you actually need a pin. You need a needle, something really, really small and you press down in that hole and you will actually feel a button get depressed and that resets your keyboard and then Wally at that point should go ahead and actually flash the keyboard. It'll just take a few seconds. Once you press that button, let me go ahead and kill that. Now some of my other thoughts on the Plank Easy we should talk about price because that's usually the first thing people ask me when I talk about these keyboards like the ErgoDocs, the Moonlander and the Plank Easy is what's the price and oh my God, they're expensive, right? Well the good thing is because the Plank is a smaller keyboard it is cheaper than the ErgoDocs and the Moonlander which those two keyboards typically retail around 365 I think is what the asking price for those are. The Plank I believe runs about 265. Now I've been playing with this keyboard for about five days now and I actually find it rather easy to type on. Now I do struggle a little bit when I'm moving from my ErgoDocs to the Plank Easy because obviously one of them has thumb clusters and one of them doesn't but other than that, I mean, both of them are very similar as far as the ortho linear placement of the keys. So it's really easy, much easier for me to move from the ErgoDocs to the Plank and vice versa than a standard keyboard and the ErgoDocs, for example. Now I mentioned I would probably stick with using the ErgoDocs and the Moonlander on my main workstations here at the office and the one at the house rather than using the Plank Easy as like my full-time keyboard and that's because, you know, those workstations they're stationary I don't mind having the bigger keyboards because I do think, you know, these have some advantages. The split keyboards are just super nice the thumb clusters, it's just a beautiful way to type where I think the Plank Easy and one of the reasons I bought it is so dang small. The fact that it's about the size of my phone that is incredible. I could imagine this being so portable of course you could have a carrying case. Matter of fact, I'm surprised ZSA actually doesn't ship this thing with its own carrying case because I think that would actually make sense. I think that's a big use case for that keyboard. They probably should either include it or at least offer one as an accessory to purchase as an add-on. One of the other really neat things about this because it's so small, so portable. I mean, you could almost have your own portable computer if you paired this thing with like a Raspberry Pi 4 and that's kind of what I'm thinking because a Raspberry Pi 4 is like half the size of this keyboard and this keyboard's tiny. You know, I could actually fit a Pi 4, this keyboard and maybe a mouse, you know, a USB mouse in a bag and not much bigger than the box that the keyboard itself shipped in and you could have this really tiny package of basically a portable computer. The only thing you would be missing would be a display but if you had a situation where you often had to do work between multiple places and you had monitors at multiple places and all you needed was to bring everything else, I think something like the easy, the Plank Easy makes a whole lot of sense. Now I'm kind of intrigued by that actually. I'm kind of intrigued. I'm actually thinking about it just for funsies actually making my own like go bag, my bug out bag, my portable bag where I can carry my own computer around with me and the small little almost like an emergency aid kit. One last thing I do wanna mention is the other day I gave you guys a heads up that this video of the Plank Easy would be coming. I posted more than five, six days ago on my community tab on YouTube that I purchased the Plank and that I was playing with it and I'd be making a video about it and a lot of people were kind of negative when I posted the picture of this Plank because I guess a lot of people don't understand the point of these 40% keyboards. Many people were confused how you could even use a keyboard that was what they called limiting because it doesn't have enough keys. And then I heard many people yelling that they were gonna miss all of their keys because there's no function keys, no numpad and media keys, all of that. And it's interesting that they use that term. I'm gonna miss certain keys. Well, they're partially right. They are going to miss certain keys, but here's the thing, you're less likely to miss the keys you're actually trying to type now because by having only 47 keys on this keyboard, you can't mistype, right? There's so few keys here, you're never going to accidentally hit the wrong thing the way you do on a 110 key keyboard, a big keyboard, you know, the standard 110 key keyboard that's like four times the size of this thing. You mistype on that all the time because there's so many keys to hit and you're constantly stretching out and having to move off the home road of things and you're always hitting the wrong key, accidentally turning on the num lock or the caps lock or whatever it happens to be. You can't do any of that on this keyboard. You're never gonna mistype because you only have a limited amount of keys on each layer and then if you want those other extra keys, the function keys, the numpad, you go to a different layer, you hold the button to go to that layer and still when you're on that layer, you're only getting the function keys and the numpad and you're just getting a limited set of keys. Again, you can't mistype. So I think that's one of the things I don't think enough people put out there is the advantages of these 40% keyboards is the fact that you're typing will actually improve. You're gonna make far less mistakes now on this keyboard because in many ways, you can't make as many mistakes. Overall, I'm really impressed with this thing. I'm really glad I purchased this. This has been fun. It's been fun the last few days playing with the Oryx layout configurator and finding out what layouts work for me, what don't, what keys I need, which keys I don't need and plus just typing on this thing is so enjoyable. By the way, the switches are Cherry MX Browns. I went with Cherry brand switches because I'd been using the kill switches on the ErgoDocs and the Moonlander. I have kill copper switches on both my ErgoDocs and my Moonlander and I thought I would try out the Cherry switches. So I went with something kind of comparable, which is the Cherry MX Browns and they're lovely. I really don't notice much difference between the Cherry MX Browns and the kill coppers actually, which is kind of nice. So it makes it really easy for me to transition from the Moonlander, for example, to the Plank Easy. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Devon Gabe James, Matt, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes, Akami Allen, Linux Ninja, Chuck, Commander, Angry Curt, Diokai, David Dillon, Gregory Heiko, Kaskali, Maxim, Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Fodor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the Plank Easy would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. So if you like my work and wanna support me, please consider subscribing to Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.