If you’re coming from a standard, row-staggered keyboard, I’d give yourself a couple of weeks to work out the kinks. I feel like the stuff that took the most work adjusting to was the bottom alpha row, “z” through “/“. C—B probably gave me the most trouble but that was partially because I used to use B from my right hand.

In terms of WPM, I’m not a fast typist, but I can do around 70 on any of my ortho boards at this point.

I can’t argue with that!

After building the Waka and Mercutio at the start of the year, I never would imagine that the Waka would have won out as my preference between the two.

As far as I know, it's the same one that would have shipped with the Waka. I keep telling myself that I'm going to shop for some fancier ones, but that hasn't happened yet.

I recorded one last night. I'll post back here once I've posted it somewhere.

That would be explain it. Not a linear guy myself.

I’ll take some screenshots from Vial later & share them.

The other boards that are in regular rotation are 40%. For those boards, F keys & the other things I mentioned above are all in layers.

The ones on the left side of the board are basically what they appear to be: Control, Browser Back, Option, Command, Raise Layer. After that, aside from other layer keys and Browser Forward, things get a little iffy & I may or may not have configured them to be anything particularly useful.

I bought it because it was inexpensive and I hadn't tried an ortholinear board. Turns out I really like that format & I'm glad I took the risk. Pretty low investment if you happen to have some extra switches & keycaps laying around.

1. F row: I'm pretty comfortable with managing number keys through a layer. The dev tools that I use make frequent enough use of F keys, so that top row is a combination of shortcuts/macros that I use a lot and straight F keys.
2. Bottom row: I can't remember why I did this in the first place. I think I felt like I needed a "proper" space bar rather than a single key. Though the next time I do some work on the board, I'm going to take that out and replace it with 2, 1u keys instead.

The simple answer is "yes". There are a few options for how the bottom row can be arranged, so you might want to take a look at that part of the product page to get a better sense of what the options are.

Thanks for the tip!

I have not heard of those. I can't say I did a ton of research on silent switches. I bought some that I found on sale to test with earlier in the year & I did not care for them.

This last time, I just searched on Reddit for opinions about silents & that's how I ended up with the Shrimp.

Which part do you find the most absurd? F keys instead of a num row? Or the off-centered space bar?

In general, that should work just fine. The RK61 uses MX switches and the Durock Shrimp are also MX. The big question is whether the RK61 is a hot-swap board. If it is then, it's a simple matter of removing the current switches & swapping in new ones. If it's not a hot-swap board, you'd need to desolder the old & solder the new.

As soldering goes, removing & adding new switches is pretty straight-forward.

I have heard good things about those, though I think I was having a hard time finding them. I am really enjoying the Shrimp. They have a good, strong tactile bump and, while they are not perfectly silent, they're plenty quiet for my needs.

Thanks! While I think your caution is warranted, there are plenty of vendors that sell reasonably-priced kits for well under < $100. MechWild is a great example & they have a number if interesting kits in stock in addition to the Waka.

It is not locked. I'm using Vial with the board right now which allows both directional turns and the press to be reconfigured. Pretty much any key can be mapped to any of those three functions.

As knobs go, I think it's about average. But it's my knob which makes it special.

Definitely. It’s plenty tall to clear the surrounding keys.

If I think of it later, I’ll post a side view so you can see.

edit: side view where you can kind of see the encoder knob clearance over the keycaps: https://imgur.com/gallery/Pdo9Gcx

Clacky, tactile switches are my favorite, but not great for the office. Here’s what I’m using now:

• Board: MechWild Waka60
• Mods: switch & bottom plate foam; tape mod
• Switches: Durock Silent Shimp, stock
• Keycaps: MT3 2048