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

Detroit-based company Astrohaus has been making “disruptive writing instruments” under the name Freewrite for nearly a decade. Until now, all of these have been standalone, single-purpose devices designed only for writing text, but Astrohaus is working on it at CES 2025. The company recently announced a mechanical keyboard called the Freewrite Wordrunner, a device designed specifically for writers.

This comes more than three years after Astrohaus quietly revealed plans to build a keyboard, originally known as the Maestro. But the company eventually pulled the plug on its planned 2022 launch, and I haven’t heard anything about it since – it seems they’ve been tweaking it all this time. CEO Adam Leeb in a press release said the company has been iterating and improving for nearly four years.

Mechanical keyboards are often the domain of gamers; The company wanted to create a device for people to write about their lives instead. Without spending some quality time with it, I can’t tell if they’ve hit that mark, but there are some interesting ideas on display here.

Wordrunner has a tenkeyless design that looks familiar at first, but you’ll quickly notice that the toolbar has been replaced by a custom set of keys that will zip through text documents quickly. That includes find and replace, undo and redo, category up and down and back, forward and reload keys. I’d be sad to lose the media controls from the taskbar, but Wordrunner has included them with a button / red joy button. It moves in all four main directions, can be turned like a knob and can be pressed directly to skip tracks, change the volume or pause your songs.

On the other hand, you’ll find three customizable macro keys with the cool names “zap,” “pow” and “bam.” They are customizable to whatever you might want, but Astrohaus suggests using them to launch specific writing apps, convert text to subject case or enter a date. I don’t know yet what I’ll use them for, but having customizable keys is a feature of enthusiast keyboards so I’m glad to see them here.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Wordrunner are the two machine counters you’ll see at the top. Another timer you can use is to log sprints or stay focused for a while. Most interesting is the Wordometer dead-center at the top of the keyboard. It will keep track of your words with its eight-digit counter, and since it keeps your word count for as long as you want, you can try to finish it one day. Of course, you can also reset it at any time or pause it if you don’t want it to update 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 noise reduction so you can use it without subjecting everyone around you to excessively loud keystrokes (this could be a plus or minus depending on how you like your keyboards). As for connectivity, Wordrunner uses Bluetooth or USB-C, and you can pair the keyboard with three different devices and quickly switch between them with dedicated hot keys.

I got a chance to play with the Wordrunner prototype, and my first impression was “wow, this is heavy!” It is a thick polished aluminum finish similar to the Hemingway premium edition of the Smart Typewriter. Astrohaus founder/CEO Adam Leeb told me that the company was shooting to make this keyboard feel like a premium, limited edition with a finish even if they plan to make it part of the permanent portfolio.

While I haven’t tried Wordrunner connected to a computer, I can still see the mechanical Odometer turning when I start typing. It’s very satisfying to see it count up as I write an imaginary story on it, and there’s a small green LED when the counter is on and red when it’s off. The keys and travel all felt great, and the joystick was a similarly pleasant touch – I’m looking forward to using it as a media volume knob. Leeb says this keyboard is still a prototype, but it feels 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 hardware over the past 10 years. The campaign should start in February at early bird prices, but we don’t know what that price will be yet. Fortunately, there is a very low-commitment way to find the best price if you want to know. Astrohaus says you can put down $1 for prime access and the best price, with plans to deliver the first batch of keyboards before the end of the year. That’s a long way off, but the rand isn’t a bad investment if you’re interested.

Update, January 8 2024, 9:27PM ET: This article has been updated to include additional impressions and images of Wordrunner.