Dosh: Chording Down to Eighteen Keys

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This picks up directly from Taipo, which I wrote in early 2024. That post ended with a promise I hadn’t kept yet: that at some point I would have to decide Taipo was good enough to go cold turkey on QWERTY, and that I was revising my 30-key two-row keyboard toward exactly that. This is what happened when I finally did it. The short version is that it worked, that the layout I use is no longer quite Taipo, and that as of today it is genuinely my daily driver.

Summary

The story is easiest to follow as a sequence of shrinking key counts: 42 keys on the board I typed on for years, 30 when I removed QWERTY as an option, 20 when I rebuilt the board around where my hands actually want to be, 16 on a layout that turned out to be a step too far, and 18 on the one I’ve settled on.

That last layout is called Dosh. It is five days old. I named it on Thursday the 3rd, drilled it across a four-day weekend, and today is the first day it feels like it has caught up with where Taipo was — not in raw speed, but in the quality that actually matters to me, which is not having to think about it.

Taipo on Brownian Motion

Dosh: Chording Down to Eighteen Keys

Summary