I'm toying with the idea of designing a custom keyboard for elite dangerous, with keyboard legends indicating the key functions.
I link a sketch in this post.
The main things holding me back (or rather, delaying the inevitable), is that I need to decide on a design first, and my limited skills in various areas.
The areas of my limited skills, include but are not restricted to
– picking appropriate legend texts
– picking appropriate fonts
– picking an appropriate design/layout of the labels, their placing, spacing, sizing.
– picking (in-)appropriate color schemes and keys to use them on.
This link is an html/css sketch to test out labels and look:
In order of importance, I need to figure out:
– some good/relevant text labels. On the one hand, keys have limited room for labels, so anything more than two short words ("Caps Lock", "Print Screen"..), is seemingly a bad idea. The other direction for the labels, would be labels/styles used in actual cockpits, assuming people more clever and professional than me, have already done this design before..
– a reasonable way of placing them; currently I'm inclinded towards a single label centered along the top, and a primary 'normal' keyboard legend centered or below it ( the label for Q W E R T Y..). However, I'm open to actually leaving out the 'known' legend, and having only the ED label for keys in use.
– for colour scheme, currently I'm considering 3-4 theme colors: One for maneuvering, (ie the nine-ish thrust keys). One for panels , i.e. the keys 1-4. One for remaining ED-active keys, and a final color for non-ED keys (e.g. the function keys, and I,K,B).
(1) I am aware that you can remap your keys in ED at will, but I am willing to ignore that.
(2) (you can do/order custom keyboards with e.g. , and I have done so a couple of times.)
(3) I am aware some single keys in ED are multi-mapped up to 7 times. I prioritise a primary use label, but I'm not closed off to e.g. 4 labels, one in each corner.
