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Comment by zacharypinter | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I earned the wrath of my coworkers when I cleaned up and started using an old model M that was lying around. Apparently it was quite loud :)

These days I'm happy with my Kinesis Advantage (seen here http://files.getdropbox.com/u/31884/desktop.jpg ).

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I got my Kinesis on Ebay for between $100-200 a about four years ago. It's a joy to type on and probably one of the best investments I've made. The second probably being the Steelcase Leap chair I got (http://www.steelcase.com/na/leap_products.aspx?f=11852). I try to buy nice products that I spend a great deal of my time using.

I wouldn't recommend the Kinesis Advantage if you are using a non-english layout (dvorak is fine). The Kinesis Freestyle might be better though.

Nice keyboard. For $300, though? That seems like a bit much. Still, I might request a review unit from them and see how it goes.

$300 is _nothing_ if you type for a living and it can save you from chronic wrist pain. I've had my Kinesis for a year. I was suffering from a good amount of pain, especially in my pinkies. It evaporated in about two days once I started using my Kinesis. Now I only get pain if I switch back to my old keyboard (it comes back in a few hours) or if I type for 8 hours straight or with bad posture.

Highly recommended.

It's definitely steep (I ended up paying $270 after coupon). I jumped on it when I started having wrist pains and waking up with numb hands (first signs of carpal). Since using the keyboard, the pain and numbness has gone away.

I will point out that it took a good 2-3 weeks to get used to the layout, though now it feels quite natural.

For more info, I highly recommend the stack overflow thread on keyboards:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687/keyboard-for-programm...

I now have 4 Kinesis Advantage (2 old ones with AT connectors and 2 new USB ones). I use them in Dvorak mode in combination with a footswitch for shift/control to avoid having to strain with combinations, and I love them. They are totally remappable, mac<->pc switchable, qwerty<->dworak switchable, etc. If you have very short pinkies (like me) the pinky areas are less comfortable, but I've remapped the symbols on the outer rows to ctrl-number so I don't have to stretch my pinkies.

The only thing I miss is the ability to save the layout to a file on the computer like I could on my Fingerworks gesture keyboard.

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