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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

This one looks interesting.

I tried the Truly Ergonomic keyboard and while it was innovative, it was hard to get used to the middle row and the build quality was not so good.

I ended up buying from WASD Keyboards and I absolutely love their product. Complete customization, a tenkeyless option, excellent build quality, the most durable key caps around, but familiar IBM style key placement.

http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/

This one seems to be something in between these two.

In my opinion, the most important ergonomic improvements are to buy a tenkeyless model and set the capslock to a backspace. Having a heavy keyboard with sturdy grips at the base is also important.

Exotic features like a split keyboard, matrix layout, and strange thumb controls are just annoying and non-standard. I also somewhat regret having switched to colemak, but not entirely.

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Turning capslock into backspace has been one of the best usability improvements in my life. It just feels so natural. And if you look the keyboard it totally makes sense to have it on home row.

This, on a standard Elcheapo rubberdome keyboard.

I even throw away the original backspace keycap.

The downside is I've quite alot found myself subconciously struggle understanding why the "backspace doesn't work" when hitting capslock on other computers.

That is a glaring error of standard keyboards.

Colemak using all fingers of the right home row for letters makes a lot of sense too. Kinda dumb that one of the main keys of the resting position is dedicated to the semicolon.

There's other errors, but unfortunately they aren't all fixable without re-engineering. The Truly Ergonomic keyboard arranges the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys into a much more logical arrangement, similar to the way the arrow keys are.

I noticed that the placement also encouraged me to use them much more for things like navigating webpages. They are actually really useful for that. I also would use that pad for gaming, instead of W-A-S-D. Filled the bill even better.

Truly Ergonomic's matrix layout also forced me to correct some of my bad typing habits, like using the wrong finger for C.

For the same reason I like the symmetry of enter and backspace on the home row, I liked the symmetry of those keys and also liked their placement of Delete opposite of Escape. And their placement of the backslash and forward slash next to each other, opposite the brackets.

But that middle row was just awful. Particularly the Enter key. Lots of accidental presses. Combined with poor build quality and it was very frustrating. Lots of key doubling, and missed presses. And the caps became worn down quickly.

Coolermaster has a tenkeyless keyboard with cherry mx switches called Quickfire. It's about $75, which is less than half the price of most ergonomic/specialty keyboards. Been using one at work for two years now.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. I bought one of those for my wife.

> the most durable key caps around

I see that they have a PBT doubleshot option now, but I have a WASD v1 with custom printed ABS keycaps that are almost completely blank now. Just pointing out that it definitely depends which of their keycap products you get.

> Exotic features like a split keyboard, matrix layout, and strange thumb controls are just annoying and non-standard.

To each their own. A split keyboard with thumb clusters has been the most comfortable typing situation for me (in addition to a negative tilt which doesn't get a ton of discussion - if the front of the keyboard is level with your wrists and tilts down away from you, your hands are left in a much more natural resting position)

What do you not like about different thumb controls? It seems odd to me that the thumb is really only useful for hitting the space bar on standard keyboards.

If you use any other keyboard for any other purpose, the more removed from the standard layout you are, the more disoriented you'll be when switching between the two.

I think if keyboards originally were designed for thumbs to press Ctrl and Alt, in addition to Space, it would be the standard, and it would make sense.

As of now, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V are so standard that I wouldn't want to switch, and am glad that even Colemak doesn't force me to.

But pressing Ctrl+C requires much less hand movement than pressing a traditional backspace. If minimizing hand movement is the goal then backspace is the biggest offender. It is also one of the things that tends to skew the results for Colemak in studies regarding hand movement, making it appear better than it actually is.

Colemak would've been a better standard. But it is not the standard. Don't learn it. Just learn how to type correctly on QWERTY and get a keyboard with the features I mentioned.

> If you use any other keyboard for any other purpose, the more removed from the standard layout you are, the more disoriented you'll be when switching between the two.

I don't find this to be true. At all. I use standard QWERTY on my Macbook. At my desk, I use an Ergodox (tented, split, columnar/matrix, thumb clusters, etc.) with a custom Dvorak-based layout. My job frequently requires I switch between desk and laptop usage. It's not a problem and not something I need to think about. My brain and hands just do what they need to do wherever I happen to be typing.

If anything, I think the opposite of your statement is true. The further away from the standard you get in your exotic preference, the easier it is to compartmentalize that layout, the easier it will be to switch as needed.

> If anything, I think the opposite of your statement is true. The further away from the standard you get in your exotic preference, the easier it is to compartmentalize that layout, the easier it will be to switch as needed.

This has been my experience as well - even with very muscle-memory intensive things like vim.

> If you use any other keyboard for any other purpose, the more removed from the standard layout you are, the more disoriented you'll be when switching between the two.

Not for me. I use a Kinesis Ergo Advantage at work and home, and have no problems using a standard QWERTY keyboard (infrequently). Switching requires no thought or practice.

The Advantage products shift the major keys where you would normally use your little finger on a QWERTY keyboard to your thumb. It is heaven.

Also thumbs are kinda fat, and don't have tons of dexterity. Using them exclusively for Space is reasonable.

The thumbs are in fact the strongest and most dextrous fingers on the hand.

That must be why the phrase "you're all thumbs" means that you have a lot of dexterity.

Wouldn't agree about key caps. Some of mine associated with most used shortcuts are already smooth instead of mat (I don't have anything on them so I don't know if letters would be gone by now).

But it doesn't really matter for my in any way. It's a great keyboard, I love it and would definitely buy it again. Highly recommend.

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