The latest Freewrite device is a fantastic mechanical keyboard designed with writers in mind

Detroit-based company Astrohaus has been making its “distraction-free writing instruments” under the name Freewrite for about a decade. Until now, they were all like that independent, single purpose devices intended simply for composing textbut Astrohaus is branching out at CES 2025. The company just announced a mechanical keyboard called the Freewrite Wordrunner, a device designed specifically for writers.

It comes more than three years after Astrohaus quietly revealed its intentions to create a keyboard originally known as the Maestro. But the company ultimately shelved its planned 2022 launch. and I hadn’t heard anything about it since – looks like they’ve just been working on it all this time. CEO Adam Lieb said in a press release that the company has been iterating and developing it for nearly four years.

Mechanical keyboards have largely become the domain of gamers; the company wanted to create a device for people who write for a living instead. Without spending some time with it, I can’t say if they’ve already achieved that goal, but there are some fun ideas here.

Wordrunner has a keyless design that looks familiar at first glance, but you’ll quickly notice that the function row has been replaced by a custom set of keys that will make zipping around text documents faster. This includes find and replace, undo and redo, paragraph up and down, and back, forward and reload keys. I’d be upset if I lost the media controls from the function row, but Wordrunner covers them with the bright red joystick/button. It moves in all four cardinal directions, can be rotated like a knob, and can also be pressed vertically to skip tracks, change volume, or pause your tunes.

On the other side you’ll find three customizable macro keys with the catchy names ‘zap’, ‘pow’ and ‘bam’. They’re programmable for anything you’d like, but Astrohaus suggested using them to launch specific writing apps, convert text to uppercase, or insert a date. I don’t know what I’d use them for yet, but having custom keys is a table stakes feature for most enthusiast keyboards, so I’m glad to see them here.

Probably the most visually impressive thing about Wordrunner are the two mechanical counters you’ll see at the top. One is a timer that you can use to write sprints or just stay focused for a while. More intriguing is the Wordometer’s dead center at the top of the keyboard. It will track your words with its huge eight-digit mechanical counter, and since it keeps your word count for as long as you want, you can try maxing it out someday. Of course, you can also reset it at any time or pause it if you don’t want it to progress while you’re chatting with friends or sending emails.

The mechanical keys are backlit and use Kailh switches; the keycaps are replaceable, but the switches are not. It also has built-in sound cancellation so you can use it without subjecting everyone around to too-loud keystrokes (this could be a plus or minus depending on how you like your keyboards). As for connectivity, the Wordrunner uses Bluetooth or USB-C, and you can pair the keyboard with three different devices and quickly switch between them with dedicated keyboard shortcuts.

I had a chance to play with a prototype Wordrunner and my first impressions were “wow, that’s heavy!” It is a thick plate of polished aluminum that matches the finish of the the premium edition of Hemingway on Smart Typewriter. Astrohaus founder/CEO Adam Lieb told me that the company is aiming to make this keyboard feel like a premium, limited-edition keyboard, even if they plan for it to be part of the permanent portfolio.

While I wasn’t able to try the Wordrunner connected to a computer, I was still able to see the mechanical Wordometer turn when I started typing. It’s quite satisfying to see it count as I wrote an imaginary story on it, and it has a small LED that glows green when the counter is on and red when you turn it off. The keys and movement felt great, and the joystick was a similarly wonderful tactile experience — I’m looking forward to using it as a volume knob for media. Leeb says this keyboard is still a prototype, but it feels pretty polished and almost final to me.

Finally, there is the ever-present question of availability. Astrohaus is launching the Wordrunner on Kickstarter, as it has done with most of its other hardware over the past 10 years. The campaign should start in February with early bird pricing, but we don’t know what that price will be yet. Fortunately, there’s a fairly low-commitment way to get the best price if you’re curious. Astrohaus says you can pre-order from $1 for priority access and the best price possible, with plans to ship the first batch of keyboards before the end of the year. It’s a long way, but a dollar isn’t a bad investment if you’re interested.

Update, January 8, 2024, 9:27 PM ET: This article has been updated to include some hands-on impressions and photos of the Wordrunner.