I bought a Moonlander earlier this year after getting bad upper back pain and knowing that if I didn’t do something the pain would only get worse and I would end up with a hunch. Previously I was coding on a Magic Keyboard.

I ended up quitting my coding job shortly after getting the Moonlander so the pain has sort of resolved itself anyway as I’m no longer doing massive coding sessions. But I’m glad I’ve got it for the future.

At first I found it massively frustrating. The default layout is quite frankly ridiculous. The only way I could get myself to stick with it is by making the keyboard layout as close to the British Magic Keyboard as possible. For anyone interested, this is my set up, that took me a good few iterations to get to:

https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/KZ7aa/latest/0

Maybe I’m “doing it wrong” but I think once I’ve got used to using it as a regular QWERTY keyboard I can then maybe look at changing the layouts and doing the fancy stuff. The fact that they ship it with such a crazy default layout is bewildering to me.

I’m still nowhere near as fast with it as the standard apple keyboard but I imagine I’ll get there naturally after a year or so. I can do longer sessions on it now before I have to pick up the laptop in frustration. And I’ll be sticking with it because the health benefits really are worth it.