iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Borderlands Beaver 🇨🇦 @sandilands.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

(1/3) In the 1980s, the Symbolics company marketed a keyboard with modifier keys Meta, Super, and Hyper in addition to the now common Shift and Control, but without an Alt key. (Today, "Windows" and "Apple" often take the role of Meta or Super.) I've come up with a layout with 8 more modifiers.

An image of a fanciful PC-style keyboard (US English layout) with 128 keys. In addition to the standard set of 102 keys, there are the following:

* Three keys in a column to the left of the keypad with the labels Home Page, Prev Tab, and Next Tab

* The standard block of edit keys:

Insert Home Page Up
------ ---- ---------
Delete End Page Down

has an additional block below it:

Select Cut/Copy Volume Up
------ -------- -----------
Undo Paste Volume Down

* There is an additional key to the left of the right-shift key with the label Compose.

* In addition to the standard modifier keys of Shift, Ctrl, Alt, and Super (the Windows key, often referred to as Meta), there is an entire row of ten fanciful modifer keys between the last alphabet row and the space bar row, with the labels Meta, Hyper, Sub, Variant, Quantum, Spin, Strange, Charm, Under, and Over.

* The bottom row includes a key to the right of the Right-Alt with the label "Fn", which is intended for features internal to the keyboard such as controlling LED illumination or programming macros.

* Beneath the numeric keypad are four multimedia keys with the labels Start (Play), Stop, Pause, and Volume Mute

On the right hand side of the picture is a column showing the number of keys in each of the 7 rows: 17, 22, 22, 19, 21, 13, 15 and their total count of 128.

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Borderlands Beaver 🇨🇦 @sandilands.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

(2/3) I've given the new modifiers the names Sub, Variant, Quantum, Spin, Strange, Charm, Under, and Over and put them on their own row. I then extended the key count to 128, with additional keys to assist with editing, web browsing, and multimedia. A 'Compose' key is used for accented characters.

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Borderlands Beaver 🇨🇦 @sandilands.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

(3/3) The picture is a mockup I made in a text editor using UTF-8 box drawing characters. I'd love to have an AI generated image, but I'm too cheap to pay for the good ones and the free ones simply aren't up to the task. If anyone is interested enough to try generating an AI image, please do!

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