The Detroit-based company Astrohaus has been making its “distraction-free writing tools” under the Freewrite name for about a decade. So far, those have all been standalone, single-purpose devices meant simply for drafting text, but Astrohaus is branching out at CES 2025. The company just announced a mechanical keyboard called the Freewrite Wordrunner, a device designed specifically with writers in mind.
This comes more than three years after Astrohaus quietly revealed intentions to build a keyboard, originally known as the Maestro. But the company eventually pulled the plug on its planned 2022 launch, and I hadn’t heard anything about it since then — it seems that they’ve just been working away at it this whole time. CEO Adam Leeb said in a press release that the company had been iterating and developing it for almost four years.
Mechanical keyboards have largely become the domain of gamers; the company wanted to build a device for people who make their living writing instead. Without spending some quality time with it, I can’t say if they’ve hit that mark yet, but there are some fun ideas on display here.
The Wordrunner has a tenkeyless design that looks familiar at first glance, but you’ll quickly notice that the function row has been replaced by a custom set of keys that’ll make zipping around text documents faster. That includes find and replace, undo and redo, paragraph up and down as well as back, forward and reload keys. I’d be upset about losing media controls from the function row, but the Wordrunner has it covered with the bright red joystick / button. It moves in all four cardinal directions and can also be pressed in vertically to skip tracks, play media or adjust volume.
On the other side, you’ll find three customizable macro keys with the cutesy names “zap,” “pow” and “bam.” They’re programmable for anything you might want, but Astrohaus suggested using them to launch specific writing apps, converting text to title case or inserting the date. I don’t yet know what I’d use them for, but having customizable keys is a table-stakes feature for most enthusiast keyboards so I’m glad to see them here.
Probably the most visually striking thing about the Wordrunner are the two mechanical counters you’ll see up top. One is a timer you can use for writing sprints or just staying focused for a bit. More intriguing is the Wordometer dead-center at the top of the keyboard. It’ll track your words with its whopping eight-digit mechanical counter, and since it saves your word count as long as you want, you could try and max it out someday. Of course, you can also reset it at any time or pause it if you don’t want it to advance while you’re chatting with friends or sending emails.
Beyond that, the Wordrunner features an aluminum body that I’m looking forward to seeing in person — I love the aluminum shell of the Freewrite Smart Typewriter and I’m hoping that the keyboard feels similar.
The mechanical keys are backlit, but Astrohaus isn’t saying who is making them yet. But it also has some sound dampening built in so you can use it without subjecting everyone around to you overly loud key clacks (this may 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 hotkeys.
Finally, there’s 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 last 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 pretty low-commitment way to get the best price if you’re curious. Astrohaus says you can place a $1 reservation for priority access and the best possible pricing, with plans to deliver the first batch of keyboards before the end of the year. That’s a long ways out, but a buck isn’t a bad investment if you’re interested.
Astrohaus is showing off a protoype of the Wordrunner at CES, and I’ll be updating this post after I get my hands on it and see how it feels at this stage of development.