Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

My name is David, and I am both the director and designer of a mechanical design and drafting company I have been operating for going on ten years.

Outside of work I frequent the gym to stay fit, and I enjoy meeting up with mates and eating good food as well as jumping on my motorbike and going for early morning rides/hikes.

What hardware do you use?

The setup I use is reasonably basic—I have gone through my career learning to operate CAD programs with shortcuts and to be as efficient as possible. For the most part, a full-size mechanical keyboard has done the job along with an ambidextrous mouse. We also introduced a Moonlander MK I to allow us to exchange handing (right or left mouse).

And what software?

The company I operate specializes in mechanical/structural design where we use SolidWorks and AutoCAD for the core of the work we perform. On the side I have also been learning Blender and aiming to incorporate this into what we do.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

I mainly use one half of the Moonlander MKI at a time. We have compacted our key assignments to be able to use one hand to operate 90% of the common commands used and allow the other hand on the mouse. Being able to swap hands has greatly helped control ergonomics and posture rather than being stuck in the same position all day. I use standard printed keycaps and use the lighting to help recreate custom key groups.

The layout is most likely unique in the sense we use the modifier keys Alt, Ctrl & Shift in combination with the numpad and home area keys to provide a multitude of keyboard shortcuts which can be operated with one hand, at the same time not needing to lift that hand up too much. It was designed for what we felt was efficient for our CAD usage. We would also modify the keyboard assignments in our CAD programs to suit (e.g. L would normally select the line command, where we program this to Shift-Insert).

What would be your dream setup?

I have always been a fan of wireless setups which could also be modular and dock easily together. Being able to have something like wireless wall-mounted displays combined with a wireless and modular keyboard would provide great flexibility to create an awesome setup. The idea of being able to purchase and dock different modules together would be great to create my own customizations.