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Symmetry fans, take note - the board is completely uniform from top to bottom and left to right. I like the approach chosen here - the keyboard begs to be thrown in your bag and to use on the go, so weight savings are welcome. However, in comparison to other plastic keyboards in my collection (like the Keychron K3), the Planck EZ feels of exceptional quality. The keyboard is impressively light, potentially leading some to question the overall quality. The base of the Planck is made of hard plastic and is thin and light - so thin, it provides excellent shine-through of the RGB key switches above.

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This production process yields a high quality level that permeates across the keyboard, across the software experience, and across the entire buying process. The Planck EZ can be ordered through ZSA Technology Labs, a Canadian company that builds keyboards by hand in Taiwan. Build Quality, Key Switches, I/O, and Keycaps Below are my first impressions, and my inevitable justification of the Planck EZ’s bigger brother, the Moonlander. Instead, keys are aligned in a grid and lessen the amount your fingers need to travel to hit keys like the the “Y” or “B” key.Īll of these features team up in the Planck EZ, the single most unique keyboard I’ve ever laid my hands on. Ortholinear, meanwhile, has no need to adhere to the past. (The same argument could be made about the QWERTY layout, but I’m not here to get into keyboard debates today.) Staggered keyboards, it can be argued, are glued to the past - keys are staggered up and to the side, which allowed for mechanical typewriter arms to avoid catching one another as the arms clanged the physical paper. Lastly, ortholinear - you can go down long rabbit holes on whether the ortholinear grid key layout is superior to the age-old staggered key layout we all know and love.

With Tap Dance, the Planck EZ went from being a non-starter 40% keyboard to an “I really want to try this” 40% keyboard. With this in mind, I immediately viewed that right-hand Enter key as a viable Tap Dance candidate that could reintroduce the right shift key to the Planck keyboard. Similar to QMK‘s Quantum functionality, a single tap would produce one result, a hold would present a second result, a double tap would produce a third result, and a tap-and-hold would produce a fourth result.

With Tap Dance, you can program a single key to perform four different functions. Recently however, “Tap Dance” was introduced for the Planck EZ. In theory, the Planck looked enticing, but I could never imagine the mental overhead in dealing with a single shift key. The idea of holding down the left shift key for all keys seemed impossible and certainly didn’t seem to be worth the finger gymnastics required. It was the lack of a right shift key that scared me away from the Planck keyboard when I first started down the mechanical keyboard path a year or so ago. This layout is incredibly unique, even jettisoning the right shift key to make room for the enter key. Planck keyboards are often bought as a build-it-yourself kit, but you can purchase a pre-built Planck EZ from ZSA, the makers of the popular Ergodox EZ mechanical keyboard. The Planck is a specific type of keyboard - created by Jack Humbert - that sports an ortholinear key grid (rather than the standard staggered key layout found on 99% of other keyboards) and a 40% layout. So while a 40% board omits the top number and function rows, number pad and arrow keys, and other navigational keys, you can still program capabilities into the keyboard to reach these functions in a small and light package.

I’ve officially gone off the deep-end - after a year or two of trying out different mechanical keyboards, I’ve made the deepest of dives into the world of 40% keyboards.Ĥ0% keyboards are as their name sounds - they sport 40% of the keys you’d find on a regular full-size keyboard and rely heavily on programmable layers to meet all key function needs.