Corne Choc

I opted for the soldered build service and have been extremely pleased. I've built one keyboard before that had a lot less soldering involved, so the build option was a big help. The cirque trackpad is a really nice addition. Set up was easy, and the docs are clear and easy to follow. Just excellent all around!

Amazing for the price

good support, helping community, nice product

TLDR: This is my first truly custom mechanical keyboard, It is great, high quality, awesome service and highly recommended.

I’ve only recently been getting interested in mechanical keyboards, and specifically low profile ones that would be more ergonomic than the thousands of standard key trays available out there. I ended up getting a keychron k11 pro as my first non-standard form factor keyboard and while I do certainly like it a lot, it still feels rather big for a minimalistic keyboard. Then I discovered the corne. I saw a few pictures of handmade keyboards that had fairly normal full size keys online and started looking for something low profile, After more than a decade of using pretty much exclusively Apple keyboards, I don’t want to get used to keys with a mile and a half of travel.

I found a few potential sources of kits and prebuilt keyboards and decided that I didn’t feel like this would be a great soldering project for someone like me, who hasn’t made a nice looking solder joint in about 30 years, I was going to need someone to have the patience to do that for me. That’s where Holykeebs comes in. At first I had some alternative Ideas about what I wanted in a keyboard but that turned out to be somewhat problematic. Not impossible, but something better left for a future project. Dan helped me through the process of deciding the right keyboard for me with honest information and some good tips and I ended up ordering a Corne choc with a trackball on the right.

Now it would be nice if that arrived quickly but unfortunately for all involved, it turned out the package was lost. I hadn’t been able to track much of the package at all but Idan apparently kept an eye on things and he notified me of the bad news before I had a chance to find out myself. We gave the postal services some time to figure out what was what and unfortunately, it does not appear that it was ever found. Idan did however send me a new keyboard, so he sat through the process of making all those solder joints twice! and that second package arrived fairly quickly and in great shape.

By now I don’t even remember for sure if I had to put the actual keys in their sockets or not, but I did put on the keycaps, of which I got a couple extra’s in the package! And the board looks amazing. It feels good too and is even fairly quiet. It really seems like a quality product with endless customisation options too. I haven’t really gotten around to customising it yet, except for breaking the white perfection with a single blue key. And I haven’t taken a minute to get into the software side of things at all yet. What I have noticed, is that after about a month of use, my typing speed on the keyboard has significantly improved from the meagre 4wpm I got initially, but I still have a long way to go to reach my “normal” 55ish words per minute. I also still make a lot more mistakes with this new keyboard and am still considering tenting options as well. All in all I think that with enough practice this little keyboard can certainly be better than normal keyboards in pretty much every way and I sure will keep practicing with it and when I finally get into the software side I'll open up a whole new world of possibilities again!

this keyboard feels very sturdy. yet still compact. VIA is very easy to use and QMK is not too hard to use if you have any programming experience, but necessary to adjust the trackball settings