Having looked over a lot of mechanical keyboards recently, it's fairly uncommon to find both mechanical action and backlighting in a single keyboard. I think some of the 'gamer' class ones have them, and that's about it.

When I saw the book mention below the first picture, I thought I misread and that this first picture was just the starting point before being inspired by code analysis found in the book. I imagined a new , more efficient, principled layout.

So did I.

For example, I'd think about reclaiming the top row, where the numbers live. On keyboards with a numpad, they're passengers. At the very least, invert the meaning of shift, so the default is to produce sigils.

Nice idea, even though I'd head toward a more dramatic different path.

Such as?

I mean the next step IMO is to borrow inspiration from some computer game peripherals and allow buttons to be physically laid out in a different way.

I agree. I hope WASD starts making custom backlit keycaps though

Considering that their current methods of creating custom keycaps consists of either laser engraving or etching, and not actually molding plastic, I would not expect this to happen (ever).

You can get backlight keys in different colors through sellers that offer Ducky Keyboard brand backlight keys. You can find those in all sorts of colors and ISO/US formats, but nothing more than that unless you join some type of group buy through Geekhack.org or Deskthority.net where you can find all sorts of 'one-off' sets custom keycaps.