Guide to mechanical keyboards
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Thou still unraveled shape of silicon, Thou child of data and electric thought, Digital historian, who canst thus express A mathematical tale more sweetly than our prose: What leaf-fringed legend haunts thy tensored depths Of vectors or of nodes, or of both, In virtual space or clouded matrices? What parameters dance in what hidden layers? What mad pursuit? What struggle to compute? What matrices of backpropagation?
How cold are those cold gradients, how sparse The lonely nodes that never can decode Their ancient patterns; and how blank the space Where each new epoch brings a fresh cascade Of weights adjusting to some distant truth That floats beyond our human comprehension's reach!
O atrous convolution! fair display Of mathematical beauty born anew With every forward pass - yet still we gaze In wonder at thy deep complexity.
Heard algorithms are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft transformers, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of backprop: Fair function, beneath the nodes, thou canst not leave Thy gradients, nor ever can those trees
Be pruned; bold Optimizer, never, never canst Thou kiss thy target, though thou draw'st so near! Yet do not grieve; she cannot fade, thy love Frozen in checkpoints time cannot destroy.
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to human-kind, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know Of deep learning's vast and boundless dream.
Speak for yourself; I had an IBM 5150 (with an external CDROM and the original Encarta disc) and it was lovely. The junk we type on today is lousy.
Inconveniently, vintage Apple keyboards require ADB to USB converters which aren't readily available.
I wish Apple would apply their design expertise to making a modern, reliable(!), electromechanical keyboard that replicated the feel and performance of classic ALPS keyboards.
I use a ZSA Moonlander. Best investment ever.
This. In Plasma I swap some keys, but when I switch to TTY the keys are not swapped. Frustrating. This should clearly be done at hardware/firmware level.
QMK can auto detect the OS and can easily remap some keys based on it, and since it's baked in the firmware it'll work with any program on any machine I plug it into!
So even with bad firmware you could move shift to a thumb key, which is better than V
But even with all the programmability you wouldn't be able to overcome the rsi-inducing design of the regular block when typing regular letters
The problem is the replacement is wireless and much thicker to accommodate that.
I tried the Logitech G915 but I like a full-size keyboard, they put the stupid "G" keys on it and it completely ruins the ergonomics for me.
I'm desperately looking for the same keyboard without the G keys.
I love mine. The layout, the adjustments, the thumb cluster, the firmware. I put the navigation onto asdf to have a numblock-layer under my right hand.
Only negative is my cat managed to break the rather flimsy plastic around the thumb cluster screw and I had to lay it flat until I put something more solid under it to stabilize.
I would love to find a keyboard that has keys at the usual pitch (I'm usually on Apple products), but that are smaller targets. I think this would result in fewer "out-of-bounds" adjacent key strikes. I've searched for such, no results so far. Any recommendations gladly received, thanks.
https://i.imgur.com/f8EJnC7.png
Cherry and OEM are the default keycap style, while SA, XDA and DSA are examples of spherical. There aren't many keyboards which come with spherical keycaps out of the box, but you can easily buy a keycap set separately and install it on any MX keyboard.
Anecdote: I have MT3 key caps and they have a more distinct concavity than my SA key caps.
A couple of popular keyboard firmwares are open source. I'm thinking it could be possible to reject two neighbor keys which are struck within the same 10 millisecond window.
IOW, if you're on a qwerty keyboard, if R and T are both hit at the same time, don't send the keystrokes to the computer.
QMK and KMK are popular keyboard firmwares. QMK is C based, and KMK is CircuitPython based.
Ibm Model m or a keyboard with mx green switches.
I guess the best way would be to design your own keyboard and add extra spacing. It may sound daunting but it's not too difficult honestly.
Maybe the successors line the MX master have what made magic for me: an important bevel. I invite you to try it out
Maybe using those as a point of reference would help in your search.
In fact, on the high end side of things, ABS doubleshot keycaps from manufacturers such as GMK are considered to be the gold standard, and PBT is often seen as the more "value" option. Though, I don't think this is accurate for the same reasons that I think the reverse is inaccurate, because you can get plenty of high quality PBT sets.
It's a fun hobby, and the amount of customization you can get into to suite whatever your specific desires are is insane. I had never thought I would get into any sort of physical product design, but it's a unique enough niche that it is fairly common for people to design keycap sets, keyboards, etc., and get them built in low (300-2kish unit for keycaps, sometimes even as low to 10-100ish for keyboards) MOQs, and I've ended up designing 3 different keycap sets with a friend of mine.
If I need a detached keyboard then the only one that feels normal is the Apple Magickeyboard b/c it's exactly like a laptop and clicky (the logitech equivalents are very mushy). Wish there was one with standard/Windows keys
I've got a custom keyboard with choc low-profile switches, and I like it a lot better. It's about mid-way between an Apple and a cherry MX, and I'm not sure I notice or care to get any lower distance since these are so easy to find. Unfortunately I'll have to go a lot more custom to get that in a Kinesis Advantage/Dactyl-like setup, and I haven't done that yet.
I do prefer MX key caps though (DSA profile, or roughly), the smaller center and deeper curve seems to help me calibrate better. Choc caps often lean hard into the low-profile thing and are very flat, and I'm not super fond of that.
I think part of it is that the keyboard itself is thin. There’s less of a physical object to raise forearms and contort wrists over.
I've tried low-profile chocs and they still have too much travel! But I'm stuck with them as split keyboards are important for me just for the usual collection of wrist health reasons.
So I'm just waiting for Apple to make a split keyboard I guess :)
I feel like you can always find a mechanical that you like, no matter how particular you are. It's just whether or not you want to go down the rabbit hole.
That would be a hard "No" for me (with an addition of "Why would anyone ever want to use that?", but I understand that tastes differ).
P.S. And don't even get me started on the arrow keys smashed into the rest so not only Enter/Backspace/Right Shift positioning is gone for me but the arrow keys positioning is gone too.
P.P.S. If people like it it's fine, not everything in the world should be conforming to my personal taste, but that picture where they have the keyboard positioned over the MacBook keyboard and the top of the trackpad (and a mouse to the side) just leaves me completely flabbergasted.
https://keeb-finder.com/keyboards?ms_layoutSize=75%25%2COthe...
Same. Anyone find a low-travel non-mushy keyboard for Windows? Ideally with spacing between every 4 function keys?
If nothing else, they come with Dell machines, so if you're in a typical corporate environment, somebody might have one and let you try it.
A couple times I have tried doing some engineering related task on my desktop with a mechanical keyboard and it just felt wrong. It felt like I was moving my fingers too much. Kinda the same if I do any amount of serious typing.
On the flip side though, the couple of times I have tried gaming on a laptop it also felt wrong.
So I have come to view keyboards the same way I view gaming controllers, it all depends on what I am doing and I will use the best input method for a particular task/game/etc.
It doesn't help that most mechanical keyboards also start by tinkering with the layout, for reasons I can't even begin to understand. For example, I don't look at my keyboard much, relying on fingers to position themselves, and on some tactile feedback from the keyboard. Arrow keys, for instance, are these with some negative space above them, so my fingers can use that negative space to nail the position. Most mechanical keyboards just slam the arrow keys into the bulk of all the others, so if I use that I need to look at the keyboard every time I want to use the arrow keys. (There was some unfortunate period in Apple's history where they made the left and right arrow keys full-size and eliminated the negative space, rendering that keyboards harder to use for me; I skipped these machines until they got back to sanity.)
I'm being super pedantic, but it's not, the switches and especially keycaps are different from what they use in e.g. a Macbook Air (and not just in size). For 99% they'll be close enough, but for me this makes the magic keyboard a no-go.
I'm still looking for the holy grail, an external keyboard that's a near copy of the Macbook keyboard. I'd be willing to spend $500+ on it, but haven't found anything. Or, similarly, a keyboard that is even softer and lower travel than the Macbook keyboard. Nothing seems to have a similar actuation profile. I once found a website that showed actuation profiles through graphs, where you could pick from dozens of switches - none of them had a similar profile. Wonder why, is it hard to make? Is there really no market? Patents?
I picked up a Keychron K15 Pro[1] and have found the low profile keys and travel easy to adapt to. Recommend you give one of theirs (or maybe someone else's) low profile keyboards a try.
[1] https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k15-pro-alice-lay...
I like to tell people that - as a developer - I'll spend $400+ on a mechanical keyboard that makes the sound I like, and then use it alongside $500+ noise-cancelling headphones.
But all of my mechanical keyboards sit on a display shelf unused today as I prefer to use the Lenovo TrackPoint II keyboard for all of my work (including coding). It's just the best keyboard ever made in my opinion, and I love using it.
They are great but very expensive- this I think is one of the main reasons why they are so niche.
Like, I thought the near-TKL design of the Wooting would be fine, but it's actually incredibly annoying. I often use delete, home, end, page up, and page down[1] but only 4 of the keys exist in that cluster. Why could they not have just added the tiny bit of extra width to include the rest of the cluster?
On other boards the issues that made me try something else tended to come down to the switches. It's wild how some switches were so easy to press that the weight of my fingers was basically enough to actuate them, while others made my fingers feel tired when trying to overcome the resistance of the tactile bump. I had one board I could hot swap keys on which made it easy to try other kinds but I gave up on doing that since even when I thought they were well aligned I would bend pins when pushing them in (and bending them back would just break the pins off, leading to many trashed switches).
Ergonomic is a must. Anything not ergonomic should be gently removed from your approach.
Mechanical is nice, but relates to how your personal interaction with your tools is. I use Cherry Blue or similar. I personally want to feel that click. I also learned to type on a 1940s Royal typewriter. Cherry Red aka Linear feels awful. Connect any dots you like there.
TKL designs with f keys and arrows are ideal for emacs users imo. Anything less feels either for non programmers or for people who use keychords a good deal less. The really cranked down designs seem more for writers than coders- special characters are in layers.
I have used Kinesis keyboards for a few years now. Their Edge RGB is _very_ nice. After an RSI episode earlier this year, I moved to an Advantage 360 SmartSet. I consider their SmartSet system to be ideal in terms of a very good meet point of configurability, ease of use, and reliability.
Re the 360, I am not as convinced of the Ortho layout or lack of f-keys. The thumb keys work well.
I would recommend Kinesis as a professional keyboard vendor.
In any case, this becomes a personal geometry problem where your hands, arms, shoulders will all combine to make a physical keyboard better or worse. This is further fit +/- by the tools we use. So it's very individual. Hope my experience shared here help someone.
https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q10-pro-alice-lay...
I have several of the left side macro keys set to M-x, C-g and others. Via is very easy to use to program your keyboard, and full QMK is almost infinitely capable.
If you work in software, you'll spend 6-10+ hours a day interfacing with the machine via your hands.
So of course, the quality of that experience matters. Each person's fingers and typing styles are different to degrees so finding the right fit requires sampling. You often require a few days or even weeks to adjust and get a feel if a keyboard is right for you. I've had keyboards that only surfaced fatigue after a month of use.
I've accumulated keyboards mostly in search of the perfect one that can prevent fatigue, pain, and injury for a job that requires 1/3 of my day to be attached to a keyboard.
I tend to rotate them a few times a month. The hobby is about the gear, but the people that get really deep into it tend to be building them to fit a specific aesthetic - people make custom keycap sets, complete with graphic novelty keys, etc., for all sorts of themes, from food, to anime, to space, and everything in between. And people design the keyboard cases for just as many themes. Mine sit on stands in my office as decoration - I enjoy looking at them the same as I enjoy using them.
I want a keyboard that is ergonomic and pleasant to use.
I do think ergo keyboards can help a lot when you have RSIs or other physical constraints, but I think 90+% of the people who are MKB enthusiasts could be just as productive interfacing with a computer using a $20 Microsoft OEM keyboard.
I use an Apple magic keyboard for work and I don’t think it really slows me down. I could maybe see if you are a writer and you are outputting thousands of lines a day a good keyboard could make a difference, but if you are writing that many lines of code you should be concerned that LLMs are going to take your job writing boilerplate.
Just give me two monitors, a stock install of Ubuntu, and any $20 keyboard and I can do anything.
The article literally mentions a mechanical split keyboard, without mentioning the ErgoDox.
Once you get the customizations dialed in, it's fantastic.
Buckley Springs (e.g. IBM Model M -type, Unicomp) are absolutely the best keyfeel, but they just won't last longer than the keyboard's warranty (probably nowhere near as long, YMMV). They are obnoxiously loud (similar to my electric Smith Corona Coronet typewriter). Simple keystrikes above 100wpm often result in blown-out springs — I have thrown away my last Unicomp keyboard (after spring/warranty failures).
daskeyboard (brown>blue>red) is heavenly, my daily-drivers (I own three, identical). Just a little bit louder than an OEM Apple keyboard, and always responds as depressed.
The worst tactile keyboard I've ever used (non-mechanical, but physical buttons): mid 2010's Apple Laptop "butterfly" keys, which fail spectacularly (to crickets from Apple).
My IBM Selectric II has buckling springs, but the ball/strike isn't fast enough to keep up with my typing... so the keys don't get abused nearly as much (never had a keyspring break on this typewriter).
My honest assessment of Unicomp's newer buckling springs: you need to use a more-durable metal [see 80's/90's versions, for comparison). The springs seems to fail more from fatique than force... which is almost-certainly a materials science deficiency.
See somebody else's similar experience, below.
>I've been waiting for it to fail for a decade at this point so I can upgrade
Yours must have been one of the good ones =D
There is no hub. If it was passthrough, the cable would be fixed (or use a non-standard connector), with two USB plugs at the host end: one for the keyboard and one for the passthrough. Some older gaming keyboards have such passthrough for USB ... and audio jacks!
I remember years ago having an apple keyboard that had a usb-a female on the side for the mouse. It wouldn't boot up with my mouse though, I suspect keyboard+mouse drew too much power. I had to run the mouse separate.
Hopefully something decent shows up in the market that mixes the best of mechanical keyboards with the very basic user experience of using a laptop.
In general though the more functionally useful a keyboard would be the fewer options you'll find. I think a large part of it is many buyers are more worried about maximizing the aesthetics of the keyboard rather than creating a swiss army knife of a keyboard so that's what is easier to find.
Most keyboards are designed for low speed USB links, not even for USB 2.0. Having to replace the cheap cable normally used by keyboards with an expensive cable, at the great cable length that is desirable for a keyboard, would raise the cost with negligible benefits.
Many PCs have additional USB 2.0 ports for slow peripherals, i.e. mainly for keyboards, mice or graphic tablets. A keyboard with a USB hub suitable for a USB memory would need to use a USB 3 port on the PC, occupying a port that might have been better used for other peripherals, while leaving unused the slow USB ports.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/UB4041A
They stopped selling quiet touch rubber membrane versions. Perhaps the Clickety-M buckling springs just aren't the same without the click?
So simple example, in a game, walk is a half press and run is a full press.
You could imagine also semi-colon a half press and full colon from a full press.
At least for me, it’s pretty hard to consistent reproduce “half press” and “full press” and if I wanted to do a “long press” I can easily set it up in QMK for any mechanical keyboard
e.g. a start actuation of 0.5mm and full press of 3.0mm gives enough room to avoid false positive full presses.
I’m a tracker kid. Jeskola Buzz ftw. Give me velocity-sensitive QWERTY and I will finally be complete.
Gosh. Would have never considered such a thing ...
PS. Also, perhaps, coupled with some sort of OSD-autocomplete based on key press velocity ...
... could be interesting just for typing. Messy, but interesting ...
I would love to have a keyboard where if you hit the switches hard it automatically capitalizes the character. Then those late night nerd rages will be naturally in all caps as the switches are slammed in fury.
The one-key-multiple-actions is useful but also does require some muscle memory tweaks.
I looked at getting one of theirs.
The web-site is insanely confusing and completely fails to explain the differences between keyboards. It took two days of work to figure out what was going on and how keyboards varies and so which model I actually wanted.
I also found their site condescending and annoying - stupid banners which were permanently present on product pages on every little keyboard image saying I can't remember what now - something like "selling quickly so buy now". They're not there any more, far as I can see, so I can't check. Maybe someone else remembers them?
Unfortunately the world of mechanical keyboards is indeed that nuanced.
Looks like the ones listed currently are compatible with Linux (still missing the ScrollLock though), just take your time to review before buying something that might not work with your setup.
If there was a simple way to do this, it would make a really fun experimental input peripheral tool.
The Playstation 2 had analog pushbuttons, essentially no one used them. Even analog triggers are mostly used as simple switches. Apple discontinued force touch too.
There is an advantage to Hall effect sensors for gaming keyboards though. It is that they don't have a set actuation point and it allows for a feature called "rapid trigger", greatly improving reactivity and tapping speed. It is particularly important for games like OSU!
- low profile hall effect switch - mx stems - tactile - quiet or almost silent - adjusting the actuation actually adjusts the travel
So the last item you could set up an ultra "short throw" switch
I have gotten close by making a frakenswitch of multiple switches, but would be amazing to programmatically create this
But for me, most mechanical keyboards are downright painful to use. The standard rectangular layout is bad for my wrists, the keypress depth is bad for my fingers, clicks are just plain annoying.
Perhaps decades of keyboard use has worn my wrists and fingers down or helped me define what I wanted, but it's split low-profile or bust.
And there's a dearth of such options on the market. Slowly rising, but a paltry fraction of the overall "mechanical"/custom keyboard market, especially as it comes to keycaps!
Maybe I should just grab the bull by the horns and mod a Microsoft Sculpt to be wired, whose only downside is unreliable wireless.
/rant
Took me a lot of searches to find something meeting my requirements
I think you're conflating things. The "mechanical" in "mechanical keyboard" refers to the key switches. That's it. Then you have unrelated traits such as customization,which can express in using fancy/functional keycaps, feel/keypress experience, and whatever you can imagine and throw at a keyboard. None of your complains refer to mechanical keyboards in particular.
For a scene that is so into customization, it's disappointing how much it sticks to bad choices.
You need to pay attention to what you're saying, because you're referring to different things with unrelated words. If you look at what you're saying, you're talking about custom keyboards. Not mechanical keyboards. Custom keyboards. You even called it a "scene". You're talking about people who buy gear and assemble/modify it to fit their taste. What choice of switches they use is irrelevant. Heck, are you still talking about mechanics keyboards if someone switches cherry MX switches with Topre ones?
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/fan-of-microsofts-windows-pc-a...
I went from a full size to a 40% keyboard to an ortholinear and now use a low-profile split keyboard as a daily driver.
IME it's so much better for ergonomics with a proper desk setup and seating/posture with the split halves shoulder width apart. Wireless is a great benefit as well if you swap between desktops and laptops.
Open source firmware like ZMK and QMK make it trivial to use splits with Linux, mac OS and Windows and for any environments where the OS is locked down and software installation is required.
My non-QMK keyboard has a horrendous home+end location, which I only realized after I acquired the thing. I did not realize how much I rely on those keys in normal programming.
I have used such keyboards for many years and I have been content with them, even if a couple of years ago I have switched to a more compact completely split keyboard, without a separate digit pad (for 2 reasons, a closer position of the pointing device and easier transport in my luggage, due to its smaller total size, to be able to also use it instead of the non-ergonomic laptop keyboard).
You can achieve the same effect in a more convenient way by buying any of the many keyboards with separate parts for the hands, together with a separate numeric pad, which contains the third part of a classic 104/105-key keyboard.
The only remaining difference from the classic format is that on such keyboards the home-end and PgUp-PgDn key pairs are typically on the same vertical column at the right edge of the keyboard, instead of being side-by-side, but it is easy to become accustomed to this arrangement, which actually makes them easier to reach.
https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q14-max-alice-lay...
I've also really enjoyed my Keychron Q11. It only has 5 of those keys (I remapped them a bit because I find "end" more useful than "insert"), and have adjusted quite easily. Relative to the default, I've got Home/End where Ins/Del are, Del for PgUp, and PgUp/Dn where it has PgDn/Home. That was all painless to change in the mapping tool. https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q11-qmk-custom-me...
There used to be. I have a Microsoft keyboard[1] that works just fine using a PS2 <-> USB connector. Unfortunately I lost the PS2 <-> USB connector (which, IIRC, was an active converter, not a passive one) so I don't use it any more.
I use a standard mechanical keyboard with the standard US layout, and have not noticed any discomfort after 25 years or daily driving the standard layout.
[1] This particular one - first gen model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_ergonomic_keyboards#... - although if you browse that entire page you'll see that there are newer models.
That's the usual way people use these smaller keyboards, and it's way superior in my opinion.
Side note, the BFO-9000 looks glorious.
I have a few now at work and home, my favorites are the Das Keyboard 6 Pro and the Wobkey Crush 80.
It's just a lot easier to ask a live human
with the gaming oriented brands you often have to turn down RGB effects to make them tolerable, certain brands have switches that actuate high in the range of motion and it's often not easy to tell if the switches are soldered or have swappable sockets
____________________________________________
also the latest/greatest in split ergos seem to be the svalboards, ordered a 1 finger cluster to try but have no info about them yet
The integrated TrackPoint and retro Thinkpad styling makes typing a breeze without ever having to lift your hand off the keyboard for the mouse.
The unique thing about Apple keyboards is the very low profile keycaps and a tiny 0.9mm travel. Matias makes some very nice scissor keyboards but their 2.0mm travel feels different. Also they don't register quite as accurately, I have a lot of miskeys on them.
Then I bought DasKeyboard 4 Pro (tactile switches) and that pretty much ended the hobby. It has everything, it's heavy, doesn't move on the desk (rubber feet), it's sturdy (its top is either aluminum or even steel), has 2 USB-A, very thick twisted USB cable, it's full size, has volume control wheel, even dedicated audio mute button, works with all my Windows and Linux boxes and the KVM. 3 years later it still looks and works like new. I'm a bit sad for my lost hobby but that's life I guess :)
Typing on this old clunker, ready to fire my death-rays soon!
Alle Jahre wieder mach ich den neumodischen Kram nieder!
http://xahlee.info/kbd/marquardt_mini_ergo_keyboard.html
https://deskthority.net/wiki/Marquardt_Mini-Ergo
(Yes Yes, it has been modded meanwhile, electronically only, not mechanically. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_connector to PS/2 to USB, via modded early QMK. As did the others which I've gotten in reserve meanwhile :))
Not really. I enjoy membrane keyboards and want everything as silent as possible. Yet I want a hackable controller firmware and it seems these are only available with mechanical keyboards.
Between linear switches, quiet mounting options, and even o-rings if you have a tendency to press keys harder, you can get them to being only slightly louder than a MacBook keyboard (or maybe not louder, just different sounding)
My fashion designer, on the other hand, loves both the tactile feel and clacky sound of Kalih White Box switches.
Loving something doesn't necessarily imply wanting it to persist all the time in all the situations. I love to endure extreme heat for some minutes in a sauna but hardly want to live and work there. I also love tactile feel an clacky sound of some mechanical switches but hearing the clack millions of times per day doesn't sound appealing. And having to apply even a minuscule amount of extra force so many times with finger muscles not designed for this doesn't sound safe.
So do I.
> but that rules out Topre
How comes?
Different switches can also help depending on your typing habits and usecase.
For me personally having less keys means less movement leading to significantly reduced possibility of RSI. With just 42 keys on my keyboard literally everything is one key away from each finger on home row so I can spend more time typing and mousing around than a traditional full size keyboard+mouse setup.
The Dvorak keyboard layout,
A split keyboard (two separate halves)
A tented keyboard (center raised up)
A vertical mouse
I haven't tried a tiny keyboard, I didn't like the idea - I want to press F5 or PgDn with one hand, for example.
Personally, having tried a wide variety of keyboards and layouts (both key pattern and physical keyboard design), I think the biggest improvement is switching to any mechanical keyboard. Anything with Cherry MX switches will be a huge improvement over some cheap, sliding plastic keyboard from an OEM. After that, the particular type of switch might matter to you. Cherry Red, for example, only requires really light pressure. Topre switches are buttery smooth.
For physical configuration, I personally like either an 87 key, or I go all out with a Kinesis Advantage. The Kinesis saved my early career when I developed bilateral De Quervain's syndrome, which is tendinitis in the wrist that starts with the thumb. After years of this, I finally returned to traditional QWERTY 87 key configurations and haven't had a flare-up. I still think the Kinesis configuration (arrow keys accessible without moving the hands, thumbs are used for delete, enter, home/end and PgUp/PgDn) is ergonomically superior, but it's nice being able to jump on any normal QWERTY keyboard without fighting muscle memory.
My personal favorite mouse is the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer. I've heard good things about vertical mice for carpal tunnel.
I also got a vertical mouse a while back on a friend’s recommendation and couldn’t believe the different it made. My wrist was starting to hurt a lot. After a few days with the mouse, I was complete pain free. For me it was an instant and complete relief. I never would’ve believed it.
Light switches (Choc has some nice very light switches) is probably better, and of course you'd want to look at split keyboards, column-stagger instead of row-stagger, and tenting.
I had a coworker who liked https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/products/mk-lowkey70-black. Basically "an external version of the MacBook keyboard with hotswap switches, RGB, and caps". Dunno that I've seen any full sized variants of the Mac layout though.
Is it a niche though? Logitech, cheap BT keyboards etc mostly stick to this layout. And it's not just the left side that is the issue - they move fn to the right in place of the alt key. Can't cmd-alt-i with 1 hand anymore!
The only other keyboards I've seen with this mac-like layout are -
- https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/nutype-f1?v... which looks slick but I much prefer the 75% layout
- https://electronicmaterialsoffice.com/ which I can't justify paying for right now
> an external version of the MacBook keyboard with hotswap switches, RGB, and caps
Wow, this is almost exactly what I've been looking for! Thanks for the rec! It's a shame they don't ship to where I am right now. I'll try to pick one up next time I travel.
Disclaimer: I do volunteer firmware work on Svalboard. (vial-qmk)
Hard to get going: I'm an ex-DataHand user. It was near instant for me. Took me a few hours to make the dvorak map usable for my old muscle memory. I made the dvorak map a pretty exact emulation of the OG Dvorak DH.
The adjustment time is real for most users. I've seen Injured highly motivated, injured users, move across in a weekend or two. Most people take 2-3 weeks? It really isn't bad considering the very well proven DH injury help.
Comfortable: It isn't your normal board... You make it what you need for comfort. There are different hand rests in the community, etc. I persoonally use a pair of gel wrist rests as my palm rests. I find them very comfy, :)
Fast: People are over 100 wpm. I am not a fast typist. I'm only 60-70 WPM usually, And I can hit it on sval.
The big thing I'd say is: Svalboard is more of a journey to your answer, than just a packaged answer, I'd also think about getting a 3D Printer if you don't have one. (I have 2 around, an A1 Mini and P1S.) Join the discord... the folks are friendly... and you'll find me there, as well as other users, etc,
Don't be afraid to to own your journey... I do not miss the other boards,,, and if your said "use one board." Svalboard is it for me I'm done.
That said, the ZSA support is just on another level compared to any hardware I've bought in the past decade. Incredibly responsive, thoughtful, and helpful. My only issue is my own analysis paralysis when messing with layouts, not the product itself.
https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/ZKdVJ/latest/0
I don't like using the red thumb button or the third thumb button, so I try to cram what I need on the first two on each side. That was facilitated by using "home row modifiers" meaning shift/Ctrl/alt/Mac keys are accessed by holding keys on home row.
1. An IBM Model M keyboard, or 2. An HHKB Type S in charcoal with Topre switches and blank keycaps.
I'm a keyboard pleb, after originally using a Model M I just moved on to other regular office keyboards. I like the idea of mechanical keyboards but I don't know if I would actually enjoy them, and there's so many variations that for every complaint you might have about a keyboard a friend might have that you can try, you'll get three people saying that I should really try keyboard X from brand Y instead because it will change my life.
Your best bet would be MicroCenter, the one near me has 10+ various ones on display. I know not everybody is fortunate enough to live near MicroCenter though :(
BTW none of them will change your life, it's just hobby for those with extra time and disposable income :)
I help define the policies at my current workplace and we block anything that isn't an hid device or purely charging (headsets, phones are blocked from mounting storage) . Also no non-computing related accessories, so no usb flash drives, mug warmers, or deskfans-sorry.
Never had trouble getting approval for a keyboard ordered by the company though. Took several months one time but eventually it was ordered, reviewed by security, and sent to me.
https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/ (my personal favorite)
https://keeb.io/products/cepstrum-keyboard-pre-built
https://keeb.io/products/quefrency-keyboard-pre-built
https://keeb.io/products/sinc-keyboard-pre-built
https://dygma.com/pages/dygma-raise-2
https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q11-qmk-custom-me...
I've not been actively keeping the site up-to-date. I merge PRs every so often, but I'm not following Reddit/Discord/etc to add new keyboards.
They're also comparatively better priced than others of its kind.
The Microsoft Natural keyboards were an ergonomic nightmare. The cheap, sliding post keys would have varying resistance depending on how close to the center your finger landed, and how vertically you applied pressure.
Also, the keys were arranged over a hump. The dished design of a Kinesis has much better ergonomics.
But before that I bought all the non-ortho splits (Kinesis, Goldtouch, etc.)and keeb.io were by far the most versatile. I recommend Quefrency for compact layout (my fav is V3 where you could still customize the bottom row) and Sinc for regular size. I used Quefrency when traveling and Sinc in the office. Happy to answer any questions!
- BastardKB keyboard
- Asymplex DES key caps