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Comment by salted-fry | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of a split keyboard, but I've never been able to go down that road because I sometimes hit keys with the "wrong" finger - most notably, I need to be able to hit B with my right hand because it's down-left in roguelikes (i.e. Nethack).

What I'd love to see is a "106% keyboard", where a couple columns are duplicated on both the left/right side. Does anybody make such a keyboard?

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The idea isn't entirely new. The TGR Alice is a popular board that has two b keys [0].

The more straightforward approach to get a full extra column would be to just grab a keyboard that already has 7+ columns per side (ie the chimera[1]) and repurpose those to be duplicate keys.

[0] https://i.redd.it/9kyeyht1eqy11.jpg

[1] https://github.com/GlenPickle/Chimera

I have made for myself something alike:

https://imgur.com/a/By9YN2q

Is made on wood, to being on the style of MS Ergo but not curved (yet I think it feel nice as is).

How/where did you get the custom key labels? Dye sublimation?

A little more information I posted back in the day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/9wjpg0...

I used to hit some keys with the 'wrong finger' before. But it hasn't prevented me from adopting to the Kinesis Advantage.

For Nethack and games in general, I have a cheap 'normal' keyboard.

.. or you could just switch and fix your bad behaviors.

I would say that as a daily Advantage user for right about 20 years, it's not a keyboard to play games with and it's not a keyboard to use for a very heavy kb+mouse software situation (like cad or photoshop). In those situations you often keep your dominant hand on your mouse at all times and your non-dominant glued to the keyboard. For those situations I have a fairly standard 65% board on my desk. But for coding, emails, etc. That all happens on the advantage.

> What I'd love to see is a "106% keyboard", where a couple columns are duplicated on both the left/right side. Does anybody make such a keyboard?

I've seen some where the '6' is present on both the left and right-hand side of a split keyboard but '6' is really the one and only key on which there can be a disagreement as to where is the correct placement.

On non-staggered keyboard the '6' is, of course, on the right hand side of the keyboard but on staggered split keyboard it is, very often, on the left hand side.

Most split keyboards in that gallery that do have a numbers row (ie 60% of more, not 40%) do have the '6' correctly located on the right hand side.

Yet most (not all) split-staggered keyboard have the '6' located on the left hand side of the keyboard.

People who learned to touch-type using the "6 with left hand" school have a very hard time adapting to an ortholinear split keyboard. While those who learned to touch-type using the "6 with the right hand" have a much easier time adapting to an ortholinear split keyboard.

Strange. I type with 10 fingers since 20 years or so (self-learned with some programs back then) and actually my only real problem comes from the number row since it just doesn't come to me intuitively, like it's simply wrong (and yes, i don't type numbers really often - that's also why I wouldn't agree with your reasoning that the 6 is responsible for a hard time adapting, since the 6 will simply not be typed very often for non-accountants. If you had said C/V/B, I'd agree). Only now that I've seen the Atreus62 I've come to believe that the number row (and C,V,B) are simply wrong on a standard keyboard. They simply don't work as they should be. At least for me personally.

I have two split keyboard that have "6" on left and on right. It's confusing but not a serious problem after I've get used to. I still mistype the empty space instead of "6" key, but what should I do is just type it on other hand.

What you need, and I’m pretty sure this is a serious suggestion, is a pair of identical 60% keyboards. It might just work wonderfully.

problem is you'd then need to place them quite far apart from each other (while many of the "fixed" split keyboard have each half only slightly tilted) but... From an USB point of view I think this just works?

I wish this worked. I tried it. The problem is pressing shift only modifies the keyboard that it is pressed on.

I think that's the case on Mac OS and Windows, but on Linux you can press Shift/Ctrl on one keyboard, and a letter on another.

Alt doesn't seem to work though.

If you install Karabiner Elements[1] on macOS, all modifier keys suddenly work across all keyboards.

I'm using one "TKL" Apple USB keyboard per hand when I feel like opening my shoulders a bit. Took me all of two minutes to get used to, at a fraction of the cost for enthusiast keyboards. I wonder if there are any ergonomic advantages I'm missing out on.

(Karabiner Elements is a great tool, anyway; I've been using it for a long time to map Caps Lock to something useful for programming.)

[1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org

Thanks for posting this! I had a split keyboard and typing on it felt so much better if not for the non standard stagger.

I now feel less guilty for having two 60% mechanical keyboards. :)

Fwiw I typed “wrong” when I got my first ergo keyboard. Like very wrong. About 20% of my key presses were with the wrong finger.

For about a week I was smashing the blank space between the halves but then it just suddenly clicked and I’ve been fine since.

The answer to that is to make your own and hand-solder wire to the switches.

The thought has occurred to me - and I wouldn't mind a thumb-trackball on the right hand, either. Design in the physical world is well outside my wheelhouse though - is a keyboard an approachable project for somebody who hasn't done woodworking/machining before, or would I be better served working on smaller projects first?

Totally doable as a first project, I'm midway through building my first keyboard with a large number of modifications and it's been a really fun project. The Dactyl Manuform is a great starting point https://github.com/abstracthat/dactyl-manuform

And /r/ErgoMechKeyboards on Reddit is a great community for understanding what you're trying to achieve.

I 3D printed my keyboard. Sometimes I talk about it on HN and have prepared a fairly detailed email about it because people have follow-up questions that require diagrams. I'm too lazy to put it on my blog, but if you want the details just email me and I can probably point you in the right direction.

Building a keyboard is tedious, but not particularly difficult.

Personally, I can hardly think of a better first project. The electronics are dead-simple and the hardware is so much up to personal preference that you can just tinker until you are happy.

(I built my first keyboard about 7 years ago as my first foray into 3D modeling and printing. It went well enough that I used it as my main driver until I got a Keyboardio Model 1 years later.)

I used Keyboard Layout Editor to generate the files to send to a laser cutting service.

there are 'trackdyl's out there with the trackball.. if you look in the photo gallery 'oddball' and 'beast' are probably the best known...

You can also build a PCB (or two) pretty easily. That’s what I did when I built my keyboard. You can find the source here: https://github.com/ecopoesis/nek-type-a

On my keyboard, B is exactly equidistant between F and J so I couldn't even tell you which finger is correct for it. I wonder how it was decided which side it should go on in a split keyboard?

> On my keyboard, B is exactly equidistant between F and J so I couldn't even tell you which finger is correct for it.

It's not about distance but about logic. If the right index finger does y,h,n and u,j,m then the left index finger does r,f,v and t,g,b. Otherwise your left index only does five letters while your right index does 7.

Depending on how "badly" a staggered keyboard is staggered, some keys can be closer to one hand or another, but it doesn't change what the correct way to touch-type is.

If in doubt, look at where the keys are placed on ergonomic split ortholinear keyboard: the people designing these things tend to know what they're doing.

> Otherwise your left index only does five letters while your right index does 7.

Which, if you're right-handed, makes some amount of sense.

It's not at all clear that they "know what they're doing" in some way that makes what they're doing "correct."

If they and a majority of their customers learned to type Z with the left little finger, X with the ring finger, etc., that does not magically make that a better way to type than typing Z with the ring finger and X with the middle one.

Quite the contrary: If you bring your hands together naturally in front of you, they form an inverted V. In order to type the bottom row with the little finger on Z, you have to cock your wrist significantly, which is clearly worse from an ergonomics perspective.

If you bring your hands together like hands naturally come together, on the type of staggered keyboard virtually everyone learns to type on, an ortholinear one with be entirely wrong for you on the whole bottom row.

Designing around bad training may be a type of "knowing what they're doing," but it doesn't make it "correct," or even better.

I hit air for the first week with a let's split, but it chilled out. I'm probably about as fast on a macbook keyboard two+ years on even though I use it way less.

So, this is one of those things that would likely be very painful for a short period of time as you adjust to typing on a split keyboard. I was the same way when I typed on a normal stagggered layout, but being completely unable to do that, brain relatively quickly adjusted to that change.

You can unlearn the habit with time. Also, I've played roguelikes (such as CDDA) using dvorak and no numpad. Even with the movement keys spread out, it's not bad. Helps that they're turn-based games. I remap all the keys in Minetest and Xonotic.

You get used to that pretty quickly.

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