alt Hacker NewsThe main question should be: are split keyboards any better than normal keyboard?
When I gave it a look, the studies were on the side of split keyboards being the hardware equivalent of snake oil.
But whatever.
And maybe then: are keyboards the best input device in 2026?
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It seems pretty obvious to me that it can't be worse, considering you could still put the two halves in exactly the same position as if they were attached.
completely anecdotally (sample size of one!) but I found big improvement in comfort and posture when i moved to the kinesis ergo (split, but joined) about 15 years ago.
Eventually I moved to a full split, positioned quite some distance apart (~25cm) and found that even more comfortable.
Always hard to know with stuff like this if you are just imagining it, but for various reasons, I'm pretty convinced it was an improvement for me.
for me its the outside angle between my wrist and my forearm. When I any of my splits it removes the angle entirely, and the pain for me is gone.
By what metric makes a keyboard "best"? It's crazy subjective, and objectively diverse as we are all shaped differently with different levels of injury/wear etc.
Who cares if it's "better" if it's working better for you?
Maybe it depends on your individual anatomy, and the sensitivity of it to stresses?
Anyway, the fact alone that you have less bend in the joints of your hands, if used right, seems to avoid all sorts of carpal-tunnel syndrome?
Depends on the amount of effort you put into them, and the kind of work you do on the computer. Regular users should stick to regular keyboards. Power users (like programmers) can spend a few months with a split keyboard and customize their layout and come out the other side with a personal brain-computer interface (fingers + keyboard).
I can speak anecdotally, at least.
My shoulders are pretty wide for my frame. When using most laptop keyboards and many standard keyboards, I have to tuck my shoulders in and twist my wrists. This was causing some serious pain and tension in my neck, shoulders, and wrists, likely leading toward carpal tunnel.
I made two different changes in succession that helped greatly (and I don't remember the order now):
1. With a split keyboard, the halves could be placed so my wrists are straight and my arms hold at shoulder-width, and this rapidly reduced the amount of tension I was experiencing and gradually eased my wrist issues. Tenting the keyboard and getting a vertical mouse helped as well, but I'd rate those as minor improvements, especially since I aim not to drive with the mouse as much.
2. With Colemak layout, I was able to gradually transition from QWERTY (there's a series of AHK scripts I found at the time that basically rotated triples of keys). This helped reduce wrist strain at the hand level.