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Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

> But if it's not a wireless, split, ergonomic keyboard, I am not interested

Not wireless, but I've recnetly gotten a ZSA Moonlander [1] keyboard and I'm in love. It's wonderful. Like the System76 one, it's open source and you store the keyboard config on-device.

[1] https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/

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Moving some of the keys around, like the parenthesis and such makes me shy away from most keyboard of this ilk. I do like the idea of additional thumb keys though. My ideal is an 80% keyboard with additional thumbs so I'm quite tempted by the X-Bows Knight[1].

[1] https://x-bows.com/products/x-bows-knight-ergonomic-mechanic...

If an 80% split or unified keyboard with additional thumbs is all you're after, the Dygma Raise might be just what you're after: https://dygma.com

That does look interesting, although it is a 60% keyboard (no arrows, pg up/down, delete or function keys).

I took the plunge a few months ago on the Moonlander hoping to alleviate wrist pain and have not regretted it one bit.

I wonder what are the thumb keys mapped to? Or what did you choose to map them to?

The base layer of my left thumb cluster has Space, Ctrl, Alt and a key for switching layers. My right thumb cluster's base layer has Enter, Tab, Backspace and Esc.

Left is space, backspace, command, and a macro for Raycast. Right is escape, enter, tab, and layer switch key for media controls.

Ergodox and the like have one big problem: hard or impossible to use if you need a layout for a language that has more than 26 characters.

I disagree. This keyboard has programmable layers that can be switched between quite easily. For instance, I have a whole layer for greek characters because I use them a lot whilst programming.

Developing muscle memory for the layers takes time, but it's not so bad.

What does this have to do with the fact that I need all of my russian alphabet when I type in russian?

The problem is that the default russian qwerty (or rather йцукен) simply won't fit. You will have to bind additional characters to weird places, which will be messing with your muscle memory or use layers, as you've said. Which is super annoying. Imagine you have to switch to a different layer when you need to type 'z', 'h', 's' and 'p' for example.

The Moonlander has 70 keys on it. If you don't want to split up your alphabet, just assign your whole alphabet to the first layer and move things like punctuation or numbers to the next layer There's plenty of room on this keyboard for bigger alphabets.

Again - the issue is that this breaks default layout. Obviously any keyboard with at least 33 keys will be enough for me to just place the alphabet on them. The problems is that this breaks everything.

Anyhow - after a bunch of keyboards all I can say is that 60-65% ones are the best. I get everything I need - not more, no less.

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