Some of you may have noticed that /dev/tty has dropped again. Waaaay sooner than I expected actually. As you know by now I don’t like to rush a product release and considering the round 1 hiccups, I would have liked a couple of weeks more to plan a good fight strategy.

Anywho. Device Terminal (that’s how you pronounce it!) round 2 is up and kicking. The official name would be /dev/tty1 (it’s 0-based) and we have approximately a month to fix the issues we encountered in the first iteration. Namely the drunken legends. MassDrop reassure me that they made so no more bold, tilted, not-centered legends will leave the factory. I hope they will let me check that before shipping to customers.

What’s new in round two

Small updates at each new drop are mandatory and are what make each revision unique. First of all of course we removed the limited edition “/dev/tty0” novelty key. Also the Cyrillic kit was removed and will be hardly repeated, at least in that form.

Last time we promised Ergodox compatibility and we delivered; a blank Ergodox kit is now available. Another fine addition are spacebars! We now support 7u, 6.25u, 6u, 4u, 3u, 2u spacebars in both Row 4 (angled) and Row 5 (flat). I hope next time to be able to add even more. We are still working on the stems position, they will be very likely centered.

I added a few keys here and there for a wider support of new and old keyboards and I believe a Tokyo60 specific set will be released at a later time.

Orange color will be fixed, it’s not how I wanted it, I’m sorry but it won’t match with the previous drop but all other colors will be the same! Including teal, which is a wonderful vibrant color that I 100% endorse and love.

The elves are coming!

They are snob, spoiled and bitchy but we can’t stop loving them.

I already worked on an Elvish kit for the Granite set in the past, but this time we brought it to the next level. The alphas are still compatible with Daniel Smith’s font and all extra keys and modifiers have been translated to Sindarin. Yes, I said “translated”. The Enter key for example reads minno, that means “enter” in Elvish, it’s not just a transliteration of the English word. Of course we don’t have an extended Sindarin vocabulary and we had to take some licenses but if you are curious about how all the legends were translated, here’s a quick reference:

Good match

  • Enter > minno
  • Escape > awartho (abandon)
  • Control > tortho
  • Insert > nest, abbr. of nestegi
  • Home >
  • End > meth
  • Pause/Break > daro (stop)
  • Page Up > cebi am (leap up)
  • Page Down > cebi dad (leap down)
  • Caps Lock > pedi caun (speak loud)
  • Scroll Lock > hebi yred (hold running)
  • Num Lock > hebi gwenyd (hold numbers)
  • Alt > eichiad (change), eichiad is a “neologism”, it doesn’t come from any original Tolkien lore
  • Function keys > phui-1, phui-2, phui-3 … (it’s like literally saying Ef-1, Ef-2 Ef-3…)
  • Shift > ortho (raise)

A bit of a stretch

  • Delete > geli (shine clear)
  • Back space > gwo dan (go back)
  • Print Screen > teitho parf (write a book, yeah I know, but it’s cute)
  • FN > esgail (literary veils, by ext. layers)
  • Super (OS key) > orchal (superior)
  • Menu > I can’t find anything so I phonetically transliterated the word “menu”
  • Tab > sarf (table)

Regarding how to write in Elvish I suggest you to head to the post I wrote when we released the Elven Tongue kit for Granite.

Before I leave please let me stress on the fact that /dev/tty is not just another color scheme over an existing keycap profile. We designed a completely new high-profile keyset –named MT3– that is not just nice to see but great to type on. You are not buying some SA clone, you are buying months of research in trying to do the perfect tall keycap.

Massdrop x Matt3o /dev/tty MT3 Custom Keycap Set