Each key on this keyboard gives me a
different typographical space. I can use it to add hair spaces around em dashes — like here — just so they don’t touch the letters. I can e m p h a s i z e without needing italics or bold. Or I can do all sort of
trivial or
serious shenanigans with the zero-width spaces.
I am a big fan of treating a joke incredibly seriously, inspired by the likes of Weird Al or Penn & Teller and the amount of unseen effort they expend towards what most treat as trivial. And so I decided to go all in on this little keyboard: I used the right key profiles for two of the rows, added ridges on two middle keys to help orient your fingers for touch typing, and added labels… although of a different kind.
Since each space looks the same, I varied the f e e l of every key. I did the opposite of what one normally does, and put different switches underneath keys according to a simple principle: the thinner spaces should be lighter on your fingers than the wider ones, and the spaces not allowed to break will click when you press them.