Absolutely this - I use a Corne and it's my favourite keyboard for productivity by miles.
I do have another keyboard - a 61 key that I use for gaming, but for day-to-day productivity the corne is absolutely glorious.
I do have another keyboard - a 61 key that I use for gaming, but for day-to-day productivity the corne is absolutely glorious.
I personally use auto-shift (long press for shift) on my 34 key layout, but I think most would prefer the one-shot shift.
I also liked QMK's "caps word" feature. It's like CapsLock, but only for UNDERSCORED_WORDS. (i.e. the keyboard returns to non-CapsLock after typing a non-word letter, like space/esc/tab/etc.).
I also have one-shot combos for ctrl on the home-row, so to do Ctrl-N for instance I can just tap ring + middle finger on the home-row followed by N. Super convenient. (You can hold one-shot modifiers to act like a regular one too.)
On my Corne, I hold the S key and then hit H to type {
Both on the home row along with my other “surrounds” I use while programming a lot.
Holding S + …
H = {
J = (
K = [
L = <
Obviously there’s a learning curve but it feels much better. Would be silly to lose sections of my career to injured hands from poorly designed keyboards!