Any QWERTY or QWERTY-inspired keyboard (layout) is silly.
Switching to orto without solving a real bottleneck is like changing Opel to Porshe but keep using a set of square wheels. Of course the car will run better, but...
My experience switching layout is poor. I touch typed Qwerty at around 75 WPM. I switched to Colemak, and after a month or so of Monkeytype I am back at around 75 WPM but didn't gain significant speed. I never had serious wrist pain, so I can't say Colemak helped with that.
After sharing this with some people, it turns out that a lot of speed gains, and maybe wrist pain improvement, comes from people that switch from Qwerty + peeking (and sometimes avoiding pinky) to Other layout + touch typing.
My only gain with Colemak is that typing feels smoother than Qwerty, but I can't honestly recommend anyone the switch. Using other computers, which are all in Qwerty, is now unconfortable.
I switched to colemak, but I paired this switch with split keyboards. So qwerty is still easy to use on regular keyboards, but I'm sure I'd get super tripped up if I used qwerty on a split kb.
You have read my comment inattentively, I consider QWERTY-inspired ones exactly as weak as QWERTY.
Speed is not important in typing goals at all. What maters is ability to delegate a typing routine out of your consciousness. No peeking, no misusing pinkies, no caring about WPM, no mismatching keys from different layouts. You should always prefer to put all of your 10 fingers on the keyboard even if all you need is to type one letter, even being interrupted from sleep, because you should understand that touchtyping is faster than hunt-and-peck even in one-button case.
You either can input your password using touchtyping or not. If you have achieved touchtyping on any layout, no switching helps you to decrease cognitive hardness. Touchtyping should be done in youth, so if you are not cosplaying some idiots you should devote your brain cells to the proper layout at once.
Interesting. My experience is almost the same. But I wouldn't call the experience is poor at all. The biggest advantage is that typing feels smoother with Colemak.
The fact that just learning to touch type in any layout is what contributes to the speed is probably right. But then again, my experience is that speed is primarily a function of practice and much less of technique. I remember reading some AMAs by someone who types at 200+WPM and they mentioned that they use QWERTY and they don't touch type.
I largely agree. Split, ortho/columnar, and tenting is 90% of the strain benefits. The biggest benefit from layout change (for programmers at least) is moving symbols and numbers to a layer where they share positions with alpha keys so you don’t have to extend to type them. Any benefit I could imagine from switching alpha layouts (more even utilization between left and right hand for typing prose) is mitigated by the switching cost when trying to use a normal computer.
Just ask the normal computer owner to set the proper layout for that 5 minutes you will be tinkering with the normal computer, it does not need root or any complicated setup.
I have a moonlander and love it for typing. My issue is that I use my mouse a bunch as well, and find it awkward to switch my right hand to the ouse and back again. Does the touchpad work better for this?
As someone who's tried several keyboards, a key feature I've found myself unable to go without is contouring of the keyboard. Keyboards like Kinesis Advantage 2, Kinesis Advantage 360 and the Glove 80 essentially. I've personally found it the biggest gain to reducing strain on my left hand.
After a decade of exploring various mechanical keyboards (a few form factors, but mostly exploring the switches), I settled on a Topre Realforce around 2016 and fell in love. I later learned of the Topre silent switches (often branded as "Type-S"), and have used those ever since over many few boards: a HHKB, a Leopold FC660C with a PCB swap for programmable layers, various revisions of the Realforce.
I used a friend's ErgoDox a few years ago, and quite liked it, but what holds me back is the Topre switches. If only it was feasible to acquire individual Topre switches and put them onto a custom PCB...
Here's hoping someone on HN will swoop in and tell me "It's totally possible! Just _____!"
I was using a standard/non-silent HHKB but found it a little too noisy for a quiet office. Plus I like using arrow keys and found I'd get a sore pinky with the HHKB layout.
I'm back to a cherry style board with silent tactile switches now but have half a mind to try and find a 75%ish layout with exploded arrow keys and with silent Topre switches.
Same. I used to be on keyboard forums, looking for the holy grail. Eventually I tried Topre switches a bit more than 10 years ago and haven't ever looked back.
I'm using a HHKB Pro JP (although I've got japanese family I don't speak japanese): because the japanese version has got a narrower space bar and more modifiers. So I configured to have, for example, an "Hyper" key. Also for the space bar is narrower, the modifiers are easier to reach with the thumbs.
I decided to camp on this because my thinking went like this: the country of Japan and the language of japanese is unlikely to disappear, so it's very probable that I'll be able to buy Topre keyboards with that exact layout for a very long time.
Same thing: I cannot get into the MX switches (I own a few nice Cherry keyboard, like the elusive split Cherry MX-5000).
Oh you mean… OK. The one on my 2008 unibody MacBook, which I likely put the most hours in on of any of them. Then the one on my ancient and lovely Thinkpad T240 — one of the most pragmatically delightful computers ever — and probably the N33SX I owned in 1992.
The keyboard on the M1 Max MBP is quite nice, too.
Get a Zynthian and dive right in to all the FM synthesis you can possibly imagine, and more. Its pretty freakin' powerful. Plus, you can do all kinds of mad things with it, vis a vis oddball controllers and such.
I'm interested to make a Dexed thing more for the fun/process of it.
At the moment I am mostly playing lap steel but it's early days as an electric player so I am trying to not spend much money :-)
For lap steel which is continuous pitch I feel I'm more likely to settle on a Boss SY synth pedal or something signal-processing-based like it, rather than MIDI. But these days audio-based midi-tracking like MIDI Guitar 2/3 seems to work quite well. I know of at least one player using a Fishman Triple Play on a lap steel but that's an expensive experiment.
I fully appreciate the desire to make a Dexed for the fun of it, however .. if you haven't dug into Zynthian yet, it won't be obviously clear that:
>Boss SY synth pedal or something signal-processing-based like it
.. is exactly what the Zynthian delivers, plus way, way, way more. You can run Dexed on it, and also run multiple signal-processing chains for your lap steel. It is huge bang for the buck! Especially if you do live things, you can have Dexed tracks running in parallel to your FX chain ..
Just sayin', take a closer look. For lap steel (and indeed any similar instruments), Zynthian is a godsend. (Get a good mic for it too, of course..)
I am positive you fill find it extremely rewarding to pipe your lap steel through these:
I have a Moonlander but I could never get used to it, even when remapping some keys so that tab is where my muscle memory expects it to be. But maybe trying to use it for both windows (play) and macos (work) was a problem. I should give it another go. Of course another issue may be that I'm very much a mouse-and-keyboard person instead of a keyboard wizard.
I should get an alternative to my old compact / flat apple keyboard one day though. It's been going strong for nearly a decade.
It might also be that you just don’t want or need an ortholinear layout, plenty of people don’t. If you like the split design and programmability of the Moonlander but not the layout and associated relearning curve, I can recommend the UHK as a good choice.
Yeah, I bought an ErgoDox EZ and tried to get used to the ortholinear layout, but after a couple weeks things just still felt off. It's been in my closet for years now. This UHK looks really interesting though, thanks!
I like everything about the Moonlander (ortholinear, split) except for the lack of F keys. From what I can tell, Kinesis is the other side of the "ortholinear or F keys" tradeoff, holding most everything else constant.
IMHO the persistence of Model M worship is a meme. Yes a chunky Buckling Spring mechanism is a very unique and "fun" feel, but that doesn't mean it's actually good to do a lot of typing on in terms of ergonomics or speed. So what then? It's a novelty item, not the ultimate keyboard.
I'm big into the custom mechanical keyboard hobby (not that that makes my opinion special or anything, ha) and I definitely agree. It's funny, cus a lot of people in the hobby see the Model M as their "holy grail" keyboard. But the more modern keyboards are just so much more comfortable to type on for extended periods of time (whether they are 'ergo' keyboards or not). It's all personal preference, but I think a lot of the love for the Model M is just nostalgia.
I think, to a degree, ergonomics are a complete package and sound can be part of it.
I tend to err on the side of loud-click switches (Alps/Matias, buckling spring, Gateron Melodic or Kailh Box switches lately) in part because I beat a series of late-1990s dome keyboards to death because I needed some sound to feel like a key was registering.
A family member has a light linear board basically because he wanted a Pride-exploded-on-his-desktop lightshow and it's very awkward for me to use.
My fave keyboard is the IBM Model M SSK. I started out with the full sized Model M, but the keypad got to be a bit too much and as I was making several geographical moves as a young person, I wanted something that saved space on my desk.
In a way, I agree with you that buckling spring keyboards are a novelty now but back then they were a revelation, and once you start using a keyboard with high tactile feedback and positive keyclick you won't want to go back.
I still have my Model M SSK, but these days I use a LoFree Flow84, which is a smoother, quieter experience. And it has absolutely the best space bar I've ever used on any keyboard.
Or PERIBOARD-413 if you need steeper angle. Perixx keyboards are cheap (and you’ll feel this cheapness every time you use them) but that’s why they are so good: a low-barrier entry to try out ergonomic keyboards before moving on to something more premium.
My Kinesis Freestyle 2 will always be the greatest ergo keyboard I've ever owned - with cables. I can tilt at 5, 10, 15 degree angles. I can move the two parts differently (and do), and with the risers, I can tilt it 90 degrees - which I'm never doing. The flexibility is perfect for me, so I keep one at home, and one in the office.
Kinesis Freestyle Gaming for me. The "traditional" Freestye has a wrist pad that's made out of a material so horrible I returned the keyboard immediately. Yuck. This was years ago, maybe newer models are better? But I'm very happy with the Freestyle Gaming in general.
By the time the 2 came around the wrist pads were an add-on. Like you, I'm not a fan, so I never bought them. I paired it with a Kensington Expert Mouse.
I really didn't enjoy the cheap plastic construction of the Moonlander. I had two of them for home and work. I even modded a mousepad onto the wristrests to make it more comftable.
But in the end the housing being out of plastic, it creaked, wobbled and just was not satisfying to type on.
I came from premium mechnical keyboards with solid steel or aluminum construction.
I ended up with the Neo Ergo, a middle ground. Not as ergonomic, but solid feel, no plastic and great looks too.
Yea I used the kinesis 360 for a short time but couldn't stand how cheap it felt. Such a big difference from nicer custom keyboards, and it's essentially the same price which is a shame.
A custom one is worth it in my opinion. Mine feels quite nice. Not 100% of a gasket mount heavy keyboard, but pretty darn close. Took a while to find the switches that worked for me, but I love it. Also, I have lots of sound deadening in it that help make it feel and sound more solid.
But yeah, the stock browns are pretty bad and the plasticky case doesn't sound great stock.
I find it strange that people who start caring about ergonomics settle for Ergodox, Moonlander and other halfway there solutions when Kinesis, Glove80, Maltron who have put in real ergonomic research exist..
I’m one of those people. I loved Ergodox, switched to Moonlander but didn’t like it, tried out Voyager and stuck with it.
Voyager is not even a very ergonomic keyboard, but it’s good enough for me, I configured it so that it’s very convenient for me to use, I added some accessories to for better tilt, I’m good - my wrists don’t hurt anymore, and that was my goal
Yes, I find it strange that people have this preference.
If you are deep enough into the rabbit hole of ordering a mechanical ergonomically keyboard you are doing yourself a disservice by not ordering an actual ergonomic one. Especially given that the price is virtually the same and r/ErgoMechKeyboards/geekhack(which you will inevitably know exist if you are at this stage) is full of Glove80/Advantage vs Moonlander threads which all say the same thing.
I know, right? I feel every keyboard warrior goes through stages where each stage imposes a "no return" point - mechanical, split, concaved. I've tried so many boards, yet these three factors invariable remain important. There are many things I dislike about my Advantage 360 - it's absolutely not suitable for travel, even taking it from the desk to the couch is a hassle; there are too many keys (the halves definitely never needed to be this big); firmware patching is wonky (I have the ZMK variant); etc.
Yet, that is the only class of boards that allow me typing without getting wrist and neck pain for 14-16 hours. Over the years I owned like a dozen boards from KinesisErgo - I started with Advantage models, then Advantage II, then I bought Freestyle for my kid, then pre-ordered 360, etc. In-between I tried Glove80, Mistel, Ergodox, Vortex Pok3r, and some others.
I am also sad that I have discovered the importance of the choosing the right switches way too late. I highly recommend getting to know your boards and the types of switches you can install on them, and then get a switch tester. Finding just the right type is absolutely worth it.
Going to such a different form factor feels enough like relearning to type that I found it also to be a good time to learn a better layout than qwerty.
When you didn't learn to type properly, relearning to type can be a very difficult task; re-learning on a split keyboard is particularly unforgiving. Around three weeks into re-learning I was convinced I would never learn properly and that I'd wasted a lot of time and money (I was freelancing at the time) on something that wouldn't help me eat, never mind sleep.
Two weeks later I was back up to normal typing speeds, a month after that I was faster than ever. Two months or so after that, my back pain was gone.
Of course, my back pain was caused by sitting lopsided - something an overdominant hand on a standard keyboard pushes you towards. No amount of exercise and posture correction was solving it - but when the true cause was resolved it cleared up (with exercise) very quickly.
Countervailing story: the Ergodox (EZ specifically but that's less important) gave me permanent RSI in my thumbs, because it was too big for my hands, and to this day I pretty much can't use a keyboard layout that relies on lots of thumb involvement. Even just hitting the spacebar throughout the day or using my thumbs to type on a smartphone is enough to flare it up, almost a decade after I stopped using that keyboard.
YMMV, ergonomics are highly personal with respect to your body size and proportions. We didn't have the proliferation of keyboard layouts then that we do now. Perhaps if the Iris or Corne had existed then, I would still be using my thumbs for modifier keys in a 40% layout. I never got the hang of tapdance or hold modifiers.
The Atreus layout is the only one I can still use somewhat, because the thumbs are held closer to the hand rather than splayed out.
I have joint problems in my thumbs and have trouble with thumb-heavy layouts, but have found the Sofle V2 to work well for me. For my hands it is important that the center thumb key be directly below the N and B keys, which the Sofle provides.
I actually found going from non-split to split surprising easy, simply because none of my old muscle memory worked anymore, and I had never touch typed up until then, so I wasn't able to go back to the old way out of frustration. A few hours of doing touch typing drills on some free online thing, and I could type at 30wpm, and then it only took about a week of doing my usual coding, IRC chatting etc to get back up to my usual 100wpm.
Also surprising was that after I got there, I could also touch type pretty easily on a normal keyboard. But my old ad hoc 5 finger typing had somehow disappeared entirely.
Reminds me of the first time I got to sit in an Actually Good chair that came with a new job. My back was killing me for the first couple weeks as the decades-old knots undid themselves.
I got to relive it when I went back to crappy office chairs at my next gig.
I learnt to type on an Acorn Archimedes 3000 which had Ctrl to the left of A. I was so happy to find HHKBs in the late 00s had the same feature and have been using once since. I wouldn't mind never having a CapsLock again.
But you don't need your physical keyboard to do that. Couldn't you have brought any keyboard that you liked and remapped the Caps Lock key to Ctrl? I have it remapped to Backspace in all of my keyboards
I don't think that's ever happening. They're still using a layout that puts I and O next to the numbers row as a remnant of the era where these letters were used as numbers. Can't blame the laptop manufacturers either. Masses are going to come out with pitchforks if any major laptop manufacturer changes anything with the keyboard.
Well, as a bog-standard person, I use Logitech MX Keys 2.
It's good enough for writing long sessions and reliable enough to type on without much thinking.
It has great features though. Automatic backlight and standby via hall sensor, great key texture and weight, scissor switches instead of bog-standard membrane, etc.
It's not a mechanical keyboard and not smooth as one, but it's not an enemy of fingers and hands.
Logitech's bolt receiver is great though. Encrypted, low latency and has native Linux support via Solaar.
I have 3 mechanical keyboards, but one is too big, others are not in my native layout and miss a couple of keys which I need for certain characters, so they are delegated to long coding sessions at home.
For the longest time, I was preferring Microsoft keyboards and Logitech Mice, but in the recent years, Logitech surpassed Microsoft as the better keyboard maker, and I'm very happy with their hardware.
My secret weapon is not my keyboard, but my trackball actually. I switched because of a finger pain, and it took me half a day to get used to it. It doesn't have a "heavy" scroll wheel like m705 or MX Anywhere 2 has, but it's actually much better than mice for me. Also it's much more ergonomic without being awkward.
Logitechs mechanical keyboards are pretty good. I love the MX mechanical line, I have a mini simply because I don't need a numpad but the full size is also great
yep. I've tried everything from a bunch of mechanical keyboards to topre keyboards and I finally just came back to the mx keys mini, the magic keyboard mini, and the logitech mechanical mini. they just feel the best over the long term and are close enough to my laptop keyboard that it doesn't feel like I'm making a big change.
Two of my mechanical keyboards are "low profile", and they are very smooth & comfortable, but they feel niche/custom enough that they need more brain power to operate.
As I noted, they're en-US layout, and I can touch type it, but I need my native alphabet and letters while typing daily, so I get them out when I'm going to code at home.
The best part of MX Keys Mini is not the switches but the materials. They are heavy duty and made to be typed on it, all day, every day. Combined with auto-layouting it has, it's a very practical device, esp. if you're using multiple different machines at the same time.
Logitech's wireless keyboards, as you know, automatically switch modifier key layouts when you switch between Mac and PC hosts.
The Ergodox was also too unstable with high tilting for me, so I search for other options. I found the Dygma Raise. Been using it for 3 years now, it is a blessing. I will buy a Raise 2 wireless for my work desk in the office too now.
I cannot fathom all my collegues who still use non ergo keyboards and mice...
Basically the only thing interesting about the ConcertMaster is that Carmack used it (and that it looks somewhat cool). As for the keyboard itself, it is just a basic OEM membrane keyboard and that good one even. The speakers are lets say adequate for the time and size.
Interestingly, the speaker part and the keyboard part are completely separate. The "cable" consists of four separate cables (keyboard, power, line out, mic in) in a thin sleeve. Mine was supplied with AT plug on the keyboard cable and Y-adapter that converted PS2 into AT DIN and barell jack for the speaker power. The keyboard label indeed says it is powered by 9V DC, but I guess that never really happened as PS/2 is 5V no matter what various devices say.
I have one! It's fun for retro PCs that don't have speakers or a mic, as it provides everything you need right there without having to setup the Altec Lansings.
Also LOL:
> it has the advantage of packing the best sound system I have ever come across on a keyboard
That Model M SSK looks real nice. I have not one but two Filco Majestouch 2 TKL with brown MX keys, one for 12 years and counting. They are so much heavier, nicer compared to what I got recently second hand: a WASD with a very wobbly case.
Do you just buy more of the footpads online or have you figured out a more permanent solution? I pack mine up and travel with it frequently, and the rubber feet are always coming off.
3 went off so far... maybe I should try a proper glue for them? It is not like I have any reason to access the screw behind, and if, I can always cut the rubber away somehow.
145 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadSwitching to orto without solving a real bottleneck is like changing Opel to Porshe but keep using a set of square wheels. Of course the car will run better, but...
After sharing this with some people, it turns out that a lot of speed gains, and maybe wrist pain improvement, comes from people that switch from Qwerty + peeking (and sometimes avoiding pinky) to Other layout + touch typing.
My only gain with Colemak is that typing feels smoother than Qwerty, but I can't honestly recommend anyone the switch. Using other computers, which are all in Qwerty, is now unconfortable.
Speed is not important in typing goals at all. What maters is ability to delegate a typing routine out of your consciousness. No peeking, no misusing pinkies, no caring about WPM, no mismatching keys from different layouts. You should always prefer to put all of your 10 fingers on the keyboard even if all you need is to type one letter, even being interrupted from sleep, because you should understand that touchtyping is faster than hunt-and-peck even in one-button case.
You either can input your password using touchtyping or not. If you have achieved touchtyping on any layout, no switching helps you to decrease cognitive hardness. Touchtyping should be done in youth, so if you are not cosplaying some idiots you should devote your brain cells to the proper layout at once.
which is?
The fact that just learning to touch type in any layout is what contributes to the speed is probably right. But then again, my experience is that speed is primarily a function of practice and much less of technique. I remember reading some AMAs by someone who types at 200+WPM and they mentioned that they use QWERTY and they don't touch type.
For me, the #1 feature of the Advantage2 is ortho. Everything else is a distant second. I don't understand how anyone can use anything but ortho.
Yes, another layout would make your fingers travel even less, but ortho lets you reduce a lot of seeking/travel without learning anything new.
I used a friend's ErgoDox a few years ago, and quite liked it, but what holds me back is the Topre switches. If only it was feasible to acquire individual Topre switches and put them onto a custom PCB...
Here's hoping someone on HN will swoop in and tell me "It's totally possible! Just _____!"
I'm back to a cherry style board with silent tactile switches now but have half a mind to try and find a 75%ish layout with exploded arrow keys and with silent Topre switches.
I'm using a HHKB Pro JP (although I've got japanese family I don't speak japanese): because the japanese version has got a narrower space bar and more modifiers. So I configured to have, for example, an "Hyper" key. Also for the space bar is narrower, the modifiers are easier to reach with the thumbs.
I decided to camp on this because my thinking went like this: the country of Japan and the language of japanese is unlikely to disappear, so it's very probable that I'll be able to buy Topre keyboards with that exact layout for a very long time.
Same thing: I cannot get into the MX switches (I own a few nice Cherry keyboard, like the elusive split Cherry MX-5000).
It's Topre and nothing else.
Oh you mean… OK. The one on my 2008 unibody MacBook, which I likely put the most hours in on of any of them. Then the one on my ancient and lovely Thinkpad T240 — one of the most pragmatically delightful computers ever — and probably the N33SX I owned in 1992.
The keyboard on the M1 Max MBP is quite nice, too.
Fatar learned a lot of lessons from Yamaha in that regard.
Looking forward to adding an Expressive E Osmose to my rig soon ..
Just the fact that a synth thing was so (relatively) affordable and accessible and also made music we heard all the time.
I should probably make a Dexed thing. Ultimately I don't even play an instrument with frets, let alone keys, so it would only be for tinkering.
Get a Zynthian and dive right in to all the FM synthesis you can possibly imagine, and more. Its pretty freakin' powerful. Plus, you can do all kinds of mad things with it, vis a vis oddball controllers and such.
At the moment I am mostly playing lap steel but it's early days as an electric player so I am trying to not spend much money :-)
For lap steel which is continuous pitch I feel I'm more likely to settle on a Boss SY synth pedal or something signal-processing-based like it, rather than MIDI. But these days audio-based midi-tracking like MIDI Guitar 2/3 seems to work quite well. I know of at least one player using a Fishman Triple Play on a lap steel but that's an expensive experiment.
>Boss SY synth pedal or something signal-processing-based like it
.. is exactly what the Zynthian delivers, plus way, way, way more. You can run Dexed on it, and also run multiple signal-processing chains for your lap steel. It is huge bang for the buck! Especially if you do live things, you can have Dexed tracks running in parallel to your FX chain ..
Just sayin', take a closer look. For lap steel (and indeed any similar instruments), Zynthian is a godsend. (Get a good mic for it too, of course..)
I am positive you fill find it extremely rewarding to pipe your lap steel through these:
https://zynthian.org/engines#effect
.. alongside these:
https://zynthian.org/engines#synth
(Dexed is but one in a very, very sexy list..)
The Yamaha FSR1 would be nice, too! :)
No keyboard on an FS1R, although a workstation version of the FS1R would kick serious ass.
The only way to top that would be someone eschewing portability for a mechanical keyboard of some kind. I would totally buy that
I should get an alternative to my old compact / flat apple keyboard one day though. It's been going strong for nearly a decade.
I tend to err on the side of loud-click switches (Alps/Matias, buckling spring, Gateron Melodic or Kailh Box switches lately) in part because I beat a series of late-1990s dome keyboards to death because I needed some sound to feel like a key was registering.
A family member has a light linear board basically because he wanted a Pride-exploded-on-his-desktop lightshow and it's very awkward for me to use.
In a way, I agree with you that buckling spring keyboards are a novelty now but back then they were a revelation, and once you start using a keyboard with high tactile feedback and positive keyclick you won't want to go back.
I still have my Model M SSK, but these days I use a LoFree Flow84, which is a smoother, quieter experience. And it has absolutely the best space bar I've ever used on any keyboard.
Edit: on second thought, I guess some people might not like the low switches?
But in the end the housing being out of plastic, it creaked, wobbled and just was not satisfying to type on.
I came from premium mechnical keyboards with solid steel or aluminum construction.
I ended up with the Neo Ergo, a middle ground. Not as ergonomic, but solid feel, no plastic and great looks too.
But yeah, the stock browns are pretty bad and the plasticky case doesn't sound great stock.
Voyager is not even a very ergonomic keyboard, but it’s good enough for me, I configured it so that it’s very convenient for me to use, I added some accessories to for better tilt, I’m good - my wrists don’t hurt anymore, and that was my goal
I don't like the Ergodox-style keyboards myself because they're missing a row, and no amount of meta layering is going to convince me otherwise.
If you are deep enough into the rabbit hole of ordering a mechanical ergonomically keyboard you are doing yourself a disservice by not ordering an actual ergonomic one. Especially given that the price is virtually the same and r/ErgoMechKeyboards/geekhack(which you will inevitably know exist if you are at this stage) is full of Glove80/Advantage vs Moonlander threads which all say the same thing.
Yet, that is the only class of boards that allow me typing without getting wrist and neck pain for 14-16 hours. Over the years I owned like a dozen boards from KinesisErgo - I started with Advantage models, then Advantage II, then I bought Freestyle for my kid, then pre-ordered 360, etc. In-between I tried Glove80, Mistel, Ergodox, Vortex Pok3r, and some others.
I am also sad that I have discovered the importance of the choosing the right switches way too late. I highly recommend getting to know your boards and the types of switches you can install on them, and then get a switch tester. Finding just the right type is absolutely worth it.
Going to such a different form factor feels enough like relearning to type that I found it also to be a good time to learn a better layout than qwerty.
I use my own layout called hubris:
https://github.com/jpease/hubris
- nearly made me cry.
- solved my back pain.
When you didn't learn to type properly, relearning to type can be a very difficult task; re-learning on a split keyboard is particularly unforgiving. Around three weeks into re-learning I was convinced I would never learn properly and that I'd wasted a lot of time and money (I was freelancing at the time) on something that wouldn't help me eat, never mind sleep.
Two weeks later I was back up to normal typing speeds, a month after that I was faster than ever. Two months or so after that, my back pain was gone.
Of course, my back pain was caused by sitting lopsided - something an overdominant hand on a standard keyboard pushes you towards. No amount of exercise and posture correction was solving it - but when the true cause was resolved it cleared up (with exercise) very quickly.
I'd buy this keyboard again in a heartbeat.
YMMV, ergonomics are highly personal with respect to your body size and proportions. We didn't have the proliferation of keyboard layouts then that we do now. Perhaps if the Iris or Corne had existed then, I would still be using my thumbs for modifier keys in a 40% layout. I never got the hang of tapdance or hold modifiers.
The Atreus layout is the only one I can still use somewhat, because the thumbs are held closer to the hand rather than splayed out.
Details at https://josef-adamcik.cz/electronics/another_year_for_sofle....
https://getreuer.info/posts/keyboards/thumb-ergo/index.html
Also surprising was that after I got there, I could also touch type pretty easily on a normal keyboard. But my old ad hoc 5 finger typing had somehow disappeared entirely.
> - solved my back pain.
Reminds me of the first time I got to sit in an Actually Good chair that came with a new job. My back was killing me for the first couple weeks as the decades-old knots undid themselves.
I got to relive it when I went back to crappy office chairs at my next gig.
Not learning to type properly is probably the best thing you can do for your wrists when typing.
Keeping fingers on home row is very bad posture for your wrists on a normal keyboard.
It's good enough for writing long sessions and reliable enough to type on without much thinking.
It has great features though. Automatic backlight and standby via hall sensor, great key texture and weight, scissor switches instead of bog-standard membrane, etc.
It's not a mechanical keyboard and not smooth as one, but it's not an enemy of fingers and hands.
Logitech's bolt receiver is great though. Encrypted, low latency and has native Linux support via Solaar.
I have 3 mechanical keyboards, but one is too big, others are not in my native layout and miss a couple of keys which I need for certain characters, so they are delegated to long coding sessions at home.
My secret weapon is not my keyboard, but my trackball actually. I switched because of a finger pain, and it took me half a day to get used to it. It doesn't have a "heavy" scroll wheel like m705 or MX Anywhere 2 has, but it's actually much better than mice for me. Also it's much more ergonomic without being awkward.
As I noted, they're en-US layout, and I can touch type it, but I need my native alphabet and letters while typing daily, so I get them out when I'm going to code at home.
The best part of MX Keys Mini is not the switches but the materials. They are heavy duty and made to be typed on it, all day, every day. Combined with auto-layouting it has, it's a very practical device, esp. if you're using multiple different machines at the same time.
Logitech's wireless keyboards, as you know, automatically switch modifier key layouts when you switch between Mac and PC hosts.
I cannot fathom all my collegues who still use non ergo keyboards and mice...
Interestingly, the speaker part and the keyboard part are completely separate. The "cable" consists of four separate cables (keyboard, power, line out, mic in) in a thin sleeve. Mine was supplied with AT plug on the keyboard cable and Y-adapter that converted PS2 into AT DIN and barell jack for the speaker power. The keyboard label indeed says it is powered by 9V DC, but I guess that never really happened as PS/2 is 5V no matter what various devices say.
Also LOL:
> it has the advantage of packing the best sound system I have ever come across on a keyboard