I'll be honest, I bought an Ergodox EZ a year or so ago and have consistently struggled to get comfortable using it. I have set up quite a few useful macros for programs I use daily like tmux as well as making it more vim-friendly (after many interations) and yet I still find it a serious chore to get past the fact that the keys feel un-naturally placed. Eventually I just give up and switch back to my laptop keyboard (I'm usually trying to write something and it feels like the keyboard is blocking my natural stream of typing) and so the cycle continues.

I guess my question is -- did everyone else switching to the Ergodox EZ have this problem? And should I just push myself to suffer through it more? Or is it the case that I should revisit my layout (again) to figure out if there's a way to further optimise it so it feels less foreign? One of the really frustrating things is that there isn't a natural place to put fairly common programming key combinations such as "()", "{}", "=+", or "-_" -- does everyone else just use layer toggles for that?

EDIT: Ah, I see your layout makes fairly significant use layer toggles. And you also had trouble with "on-boarding" for the first few weeks -- I guess I just need to force myself to use it then. I might take yours and modify it to add some of the tmux and i3 macros I have defined.