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Comment by MrPowers | Hacker News Reader

Kinesis Advantage 2 is great, but it's massive and hard to travel with. Looks like the 360 might be a bit easier to travel with.

The Kinesis Advantage 2 fits a Magic Trackpad perfectly right in the middle of the keyboard. This lets you perform mouse actions with you right and left hands.

Emacs keybindings never made sense to me till I tried them with the Kinesis. I feel like Emacs sucks on a standard Mac keyboard and is awesome with a Kinesis. See here for a blog post on the topic if you're interested in learning more: https://mungingdata.com/emacs/learning-emacs-keybindings-aft...

It takes a while to get used to the keyboard layout, but only takes a week to get fully productive. You're eventually able to train your brain to operate fluently on Kinesis & Macbook key layouts without any extra thinking. It's a great investment if you're willing to put in a bit of effort.

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I bet the kinesis foot pedals would take emacs to the next level too. I use spacemacs in evil mode so I never bothered having to learn all those key chording things for emacs.

I have a kinesis advantage pro with foot pedal but the pedal just sucks to use. Foot is way too big and clumsy to keep pace with fingers, plus it forces you to sit in fixed position or fiddle with the pedal all the time to try and keep it in a comfortable position (trying to use the pedal shows how much I shift around in the chair during the day, nevermind when using a balance chair on wheels).

I got the pedal for my Advantage, but it is too small/light to really be useful, I tried mapping it to Ctrl but went back almost immediately.

I rely heavily on the foot pedal. The single-pedal is too light and really wants to be bolted to something heavy so it doesn't slide around. The triple-food pedal is much nicer, just because it's heavy and stays put. I map all three foot-buttons to the same thing.

I used the triple-foot pedal for about 1.5 years. I now have chronic discomfort in my left foot; the one I used for the foot pedal. Of course it might be a coincidence, or it could be a RSI from using the foot pedal.

i have one, but honestly never could make myself get into using it. ymmv but i would not make a decision around the keyboard based on that

I have the Kinesis Freestyle 2 and, while the layout is good, I really dislike how the keys feel- very mushy, way too much travel distance, and many keys require moving my entire hand from the home row to properly depress because they're very resistant to non-perpendicular force.

What I really want is an ergo keyboard with Macbook/laptop style low-travel keys.

Freestyle Pro and Edge now have mechanical switches, which are better than the membrane of the Freestyle and Freestyle 2. With the Edge you can even choose the MX Speed Silver, for much shorter travel.

You can try some custom keyboard with low profile switches. There are many open source ones if you're up for the task. One option is cornish zen https://lowprokb.ca/products/corne-ish-zen-2 I built corne light v2 with choc v2 for my personal use.

Check out the Microsoft Surface Ergonomic keyboard

The Magic Trackpad trick is gold! I did the same thing with my advantage 2 keyboard by taping it down with adhesive tape and it’s been an absolute godsend.

I’ve more or less stopped using a mouse and rely on keyboard shortcuts, when those fail I have the trackpad within striking distance.

I was using the magic trackpad, but due to pain in the back of my wrist I had to abandon it entirely and switch over to a logitech trackman mouse (same spot, right in the middle of the keyboard).

I just did this Magic Trackpad thing on mine, I really like it. It's in the perfect location.

Split hands though? Bluetooth? This is an instant-buy for me.

I had this setup for a while, but I had a habit of moving just the index finger, instead of the whole wrist. This caused some inflammation/swelling in the cartilage/muscle between the index and middle finger, so I had to abandon the setup.

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