alt Hacker NewsUnderdiscussed: The biggest difference these keyboards make: adding additional keys for the thumbs (replacing the unnecessarily large spacebar of traditional keyboards).
This allows the hands to do more with the keyboard while resting the hands on home row. -- For users comfortable adding a bit of complexity for the benefit of increased expressiveness (e.g. vim users), having extra thumb keys allows bringing the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.
For me, I think that these keyboards fix many silly design flaws of the traditional keyboard makes them interesting enough to be worth using.
Replies
Thumbs: true, but I think some take it way too far - up to seven keys per thumb! The thumb is articulated at the wrong angle to move very far, so I find that two or perhaps three keys per thumb in a single arc is about as much as I can use fast.
Yeah the thumb clusters are my favorite part of using my Kinesis Adv 360, and one of the only few things I miss when typing on a regular keyboard. Yeah the ergonomics are better but I can hit 150+ on both regular and split keyboards and never really had pain/issues with my wrists. Although I prefer the split layout more.
Agreed. The thumb cluster is what I miss the most from my old Maltron keyboard. I'm looking at the Dygma Defy as it seems to have the best thumb cluster of current ergo keyboards.
A split keyboard does a good job of enforcing stricter adherence to the home keys so you end up getting quite accurate at the special functions too since everything is within reach. I think extra thumb buttons on a non-split keyboard gets you all the same benefits, I'd love to see more boards explore that.
Programmability is really an awesome feature for this very reason. Even with a traditional layout, you can be really creative and improve the ergonomics: tap/hold mod for the spacebar, remap caps lock to do all kinds of stuff...
Especially for both of us emacs users...
There's a lot of fun to be had by replacing the spacebar with four keys.
Mine are tab, esc, space, backspace... plus layer shenanigans (https://configure.zsa.io/planck-ez/layouts/jDnba/latest/0)