Friday, July 24, 2020

Since I type a lot and I have RSI, I try to use "ergonomic" keyboards. (Funny how often "ergonomic" turns up search results of horribly bog standard non-ergo keyboards - all those weasels out there trying to shove their products in your face when their products aren't all that, but I digress.)

The original Microsoft ergo keyboard with the proper inverted-T (I mean holy heck, of course! don't get me started!) and, unfortunately, the numeric keypad, was a decent start. A friend ended up sawing off the number pad to make it suck less back in the day. Since then I've tried various things.

I also at one point had a pretty super nice Acer Future keyboard care of Weird Stuff Warehouse. (Aw, man, now I am going to spend some time crying my eyes out over the changes in Silicon Valley from when I first got here. Weird Stuff, Halted, all those kinds of things dying off.) Unfortunately I couldn't get it working in the modern world with any of the PS/2-to-USB adapter dongles I have so I ended up donating it to Goodwill.

For a while I used the Microsoft BT 5000 keyboard which is too small but at least curves.

I am a long time lover of the old Acer curved keyboards on the old TravelMate series. Unfortunately my 8210 fan ball bearings became unbearable, but my small collection of T5730 type machines running linux off an SSD has helped keep my arms from utterly dying. Why nobody makes laptops with ergo keyboards, I dunno. Just a sad, sad world we live in.

The Microsoft Sculpt keyboard (tho the mouse it comes with really sucks, don't waste money on that) with scissor switches is pretty great and has been my go-to in more recent decades. Tho, there's the sorta sucky thing where each keyboard has a USB receiver that is paired and you can never get a replacement for it... I guess ostensibly for security, so nobody can listen in on your keystrokes? Whatever.

Most recently I broke down and spent my own bucks on a Kinesis Freestyle Edge RGB "gaming" keyboard. It mostly doesn't suck! It is so close to being greatly perfect that the things which aren't perfectly great about it really stick in my craw. I did converse over email with one of their support folks about all the things I think are suboptimal about it, but yeeeahhhh I don't think they are really taking any of it to heart. Bummer, drag. Currently the main thing that really really really kills me the most is how they implemented key remapping because of the fact that I think the Page Up / Page Down keys should really be physically swapped with the Home / End keys and the remapping UX really sucks because you can have more than one "profile" for your keyboard, but there's - as far as I know! - no way for the remapping to be done across all profiles.

Anyway, I do pretty much kinda sorta very super heartily recommend the keyboard! You should buy one and keep Kinesis in business! Especially since there's precious little in the way of mechanical ergo keyboards out there, let alone with brown MX, let alone with full RGB (whatever, not that big a deal, I do not drive a car that looks like Wingo from Cars, the only thing I want from my keyboard backlighting is for it not to be blue because that is not good for eyes in the dark, duh), let alone in a price range that feels (on the high end of) OK.

the end.