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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

Does ortholinear/columnar actually feel better? I feel like I see many comments about how there's a bit of a learning curve that can be overcome after a while, but very few comments about whether overcoming that learning curve is actually worth it and it's really more comfortable. Is it supposed to be better for your wrists? Or your fingers?

The "split" aspect of these keyboards is definitely more comfortable imo - I ended up going with a Dygma Raise (which I'm very happy with!), because I wasn't interested in learning ortholinear. But I've remained curious about whether ortholinear is actually better, or if it's just a thing that a lot of split keyboards happen to have.

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A benefit for ortholinear I don’t see mentioned here: it’s a little less cognitive load to locate keys by touch. As someone else mentioned, I think “split” might be important here (and I don’t have any experience with non-split ortholinear). Also, this only applies after you’ve overcome the learning curve. All this taken into account: with my ortholinear board, I rarely mistype. I attribute this to it just being easier to know which key I’m hitting with a columnar layout. You can take this a step further with CRKBD and similar such that each key is only 1 unit away from home (and thus it’s next to impossible to mistype).

When I look at my hands (31) my fingers actually look slightly twisted and crooked. There’s a chance that I might have broke them without realising when I was younger doing martial arts and rugby but I’m of the firm belief that they’ve got this way through hammering shallow non ortholinear keyboards (specifically the magic keyboard) for years. I’ve had pain in my fingers at certain points over the years from typing for hours that I just kind of David Goggins’ed my way through. Can’t prove it’s the cause but it is my strong suspicion.

It's common. Look at an old person's hands, especially one with arthritis.

I can’t rule that out but the pain was completely linked to times when I was using the magic keyboard heavily for days on end. I don’t have any pain now nor do I have any pain using the magic keyboard, I just kind of healed and adjusted. This is what makes me wonder if it was some kind of fracture caused by the heavy repetition that I made worse by working through. The twisting and misalignment is all limited to the part of the finger above the knuckle and seems to be most pronounced on my index and middle fingers which again supports the hypothesis.

I currently using a Corne[1]. I was never able to fully touch type on a staggered keyboard as I frequently pressed a neighboring key on the bottom and the number row. Now I only have to move my fingers up and down to find the right keys. Also my fingers have less distance to travel.

[1]: https://github.com/foostan/crkbd

I’ve tried out various form factors (full size, tkl, 75%, 60%, single keyboard with wells), and the ergodox ez was by far the most comfortable for coding. Until I bought the moonlander, which is now my main “at desk” keyboard. I’m running a modified version of Colemak DHM on my moonlander.

Ortholinear is my favorite layout because I can shift some keys down one row (such as Z), and then it perfectly suits my hands.

ortholinear works very well when you use a split keyboard, but i find it worse for non-split keyboard. The angle of your hands factor in here. With split they're parallel, so fingers are also "straight". However, the traditional layout isn't symetric anyways, so your right hand gets the best ergonomics vs your left.

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