Ask HN: Most comfortable keyboard?

Having suffered from debilitating RSI at one point that took several months to even moderately recover from, an ergonomically sound keyboard (along with other habits) is a necessary step for satisfying best practices and not having to change careers as a result.

RSI is an extremely annoying and potentially career ending injury that is not resolvable fully through surgery, so doing everything possible to avoid ever having that is very smart.

If you ever have it you will wish you went with the ounce of prevention rather than the pound of cure route.

At one point the injury was so bad that I could not even read a book or touch a surface without searing pain; any force on my hands was agony basically and empathizing with people who have physical disabilities is accessible at a whole new level.

An unfortunate side effect of RSI/CTS is that while you appear perfectly healthy to external observers you are incapable of actually doing the same things a healthy individual can without worsening the injury and prolonging recovery in addition to the searing pain.

So be prepared for strange looks in some social situations from those unaware of your ailment.

Anyways, the ErgoDox keyboard is currently the state of the art if ergonomics is being maximized for, all other keyboards are either completely incompetently designed and effectively not designed for human beings or suffer from more flaws than the ErgoDox does.

Researching ergonomic keyboards and ways to help recover from my injury as well as avoiding having the same thing happen again revealed that most keyboards had show stopping design flaws inherited from typewriters or as a result of maximizing for cost and ease of manufacturing rather than quality and usability.

As someone who wants to avoid re-injuring myself, uses a keyboard heavily, and uses emacs and vim as much as possible I choose what keyboard to use based on these qualities:

1) Modifier keys (shift, alt, control, and in my case option fn as well as another key to act as a fifth modifier so that I have hyper and super keys in emacs) must be accessible by the strongest digit humans have: the thumb.

Designing modifier keys such that they are solely accessed by the pinky while the other fingers remain on the home row, the least durable digit, is utterly bereft of intelligence.

The Kinesis Advantage and the ErgoDox satisfy this property.

2) Modifier keys must have a mirrored layout such that they exist in the same location on both sides of the keyboard.

The ErgoDox* and Kinesis advantage satisfy this property as well as the Truly Ergonomic.

The Truly Ergonomic does not feature an island for thumb keys though.

* Note that the ErgoDox is the only one that satisfies this if the user needs more than three modifier keys (alt, shift, ctrl).

3) When the hands are on the home row, the entire hand and forearm must be aligned perpendicular to the keys,* deviating from this is main contributor to RSI and why in part laptop keyboards are not comfortable to use for long periods of time.

Split keyboard designs are the best design for satisfying this requirement for as many users' body types as possible as the different halves can be arranged the appropriate width apart.

The split keyboard design is rarely found due to manufacturing complexity as well as increased component cost.

That requirement is why most keyboards can be immediately crossed for not being designed for humans.

The ErgoDox satisfies this property; as the degree of deviation from perpendicular alignment the worse the keyboard is to use in practice.

* Note that in the case of the fingers their differing lengths may be taken account for via a sunken key design which the Kinesis Advantage utilized where the fingers curl inward comfortably

Ideally, the keyboard design would also be such that it is trivially disassembled for regular maintenance, such as removing the grime that develops over time from using the device, however ...