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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

I started out using Microsoft Natural keyboards in the 90s. Ergonomic pain using straight keyboards at work brought me back to them in the 2010s. The Sculpt (wireless) is really wonderful.

Favorite keyboard ever for me. (<-- that sentence, and this one, typed on a Sculpt. Thank you, unknown engineers.)

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I've been using Microsoft Natural keyboards for 20 years now.

I used to suffer terribly with RSI from years of typing on crappy keyboards, with bad posture and not enough breaks.

The Microsoft Natural keyboard has been good to me - I haven't had RSI twinges for 10 years or so now!

I'm typing this on a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro which Wikipedia says was introduced in June 1999 - round about the time I got it. I wish it wasn't white as it really shows the dirt, but the media buttons are the best!

I've got two and I switched to the backup recently as my main one got really dirty and I haven't had time to clean it.

The MS Natural 4000 is very good too - I had one of those at work for over 10 years. I did wear the legends off but hey - who needs to see what key you are pressing anyway! Just don't press F-lock by accident as you'll be wondering for ages why your function keys aren't working.

I like the front stand of the 4000 to put the keyboard up a bit at the front. It is very good for encouraging good posture.

(The other thing I did to help with RSI is switch hands with the mouse. It took quite a long time to get used to using the mouse with the left hand but it really made a difference as my right wrist was worse than my left wrist. I'm now ambidextrous with the mouse - the only thing I can't do is draw with the mouse with my left hand!)

I do love the sculpt but they tend to die within a couple of years. I went through two of them before switching to something more durable. The build quality is just bad - many times my computer was behaving weirdly, traced to one of the function keys being stuck down (this also manifested as the keyboard eating new batteries within a couple of days).

This is my exact thought. I love it, but I'm about to retire my second one. It's almost worth just paying the price for a new one every couple of years though. I have two of the older Microsoft Natural keyboards from decades ago that I periodically switch to and they will probably last another 20 years.

I've got two MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000s in my cupboard. I'm currently on a Sculpt, but much preferred the 4000s. Unfortunately I uncovered their weakness - humidity.

I work from home with evaporative cooling over summer.

The first unit lasted a few years, but died on a humid summer day. Next one only lasted 12 months, again dying on a humid summer day.

First unit is irrecoverably dead. The second would come back to life after pulling it apart and cleaning with isopropyl alcohol, then die again a few days later (during summer). Issue is that the humidity seems to short the key matrix. If not careful it makes for some awkward typing mistakes.

The Sculpt seems a bit more resilient to humidity.

Yes, the MS Naturals absolutely dissolve when exposed to water. I've destroyed at least a half-dozen over my lifetime by spilling small amounts of water on them. Only takes one drop to destroy some keys. Just after I finished high school, in the mid-2000s, I stocked up and bought four of them. Two of them have been wrecked since then, but the other two are still going strong. Still haven't seen a keyboard that I want to replace them with, but at some point, these will give up the ghost and I'll have to find something new to try.

Logitech makes a very similar keyboard now and I love it (I had to return a sculpt because the g key would keep getting hung up on the shell).

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZWK2TQT

unless you use the function keys, which are a different size, height and click actuation.

horrid.

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