271–280 of 373 posts
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It's the same as spending $10k on a mattress - it's just dumb. Yes you spend a lot of time in it, but after a certain point you're spending money to feed someone's marketing, not paying for any tangible benefit.
That might be true for $2000 keyboards, but not for $300 ones.
Lucky me. I can just go into most stores and pick up a Cherry Board MX 3.0 with MX Black. :)
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> it is a complete no brainer to invest in optimising the IO channel between your brain and the machine Why? You'll never even double the "throughput" of that "channel", let alone improve it by an order of magnitude. And I say this as someone who wasted lots of time and money attempting exactly that before I realized that typing is not what I spend most of my time doing while programming.
It's not just about improving the bandwidth (although that is nice), the one thing I wouldn't trade that the Ergodox gives me is a very low error rate in typing. This is hard to achieve with a traditional keyboard, especially when you starting throwing special characters into the mix that require two-handed contortions. I've heard the refrain "you don't spend most of your time typing when programming" so many times i…
Yeah. Yet, when you switch to a completely different (and maybe not very comfortable) keyboard layout and get slowed down to 50% of your usual speed and make a lot more typos, it just immediately shows how incredibly frustrating coding can get even if typing isn't the primary challenge in it.
Input should flow effortlessly and comfortably. That just makes it easier to focus on the more important stuff.
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I'll be honest, I bought an Ergodox EZ a year or so ago and have consistently struggled to get comfortable using it. I have set up quite a few useful macros for programs I use daily like tmux as well as making it more vim-friendly (after many interations) and yet I still find it a serious chore to get past the fact that the keys feel un-naturally placed. Eventually I just give up and switch back to my laptop keyboard…
Yeah I found it very painful at first (like learning Vim but perhaps 5x times worse). I highly recommend using typing.io to get used to it. Since the training examples are source code, it ensures you get exposed to special characters, which is crucial if you're using your ergodox for programming. As you can see from the table on my GitHub page, progress was slow and took several weeks to reach baseline levels. This w…
This(pro) is what I am using now. Cheaper than ergodox ez but more beautiful.
You may need compile QMK yourself because it is flipped as compare to EZ
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> complaining about $300 for a great keyboard is like complaining about a pricey bed. except it isn't a great keyboard when compared with standard keyboards, and its value proposition is absurd when taken into account that standard keyboards cost around 10€ and ergonomic keyboards by reference brands such as Microsoft go for about 50€.
I've used the €50 keyboard; it's certainly better than the €5 keyboard (at retail) that ships with most desktops, but it's still not anywhere near as good as a Kinesis or Maltron, the cost of either is less than 1‰ (so a rounding error of a rounding error) of the cost of employing me for a year, and they'll last longer than the five-year depreciation period for office equipment.
One can easily spend more in coffee over a few months than it costs to buy one of these somewhat better keyboards.
I love the idea of a mechanical keyboard (and I would love to build one), but I hate the thick keys and travel distance of each key press (I'm used to the thing keys on my MacBook Pro). Are there any mechanical switches that are low-travel?
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It's not the bandwidth per se, so much it's the continuous attention cost spent on keeping that bandwidth going. Better tactile feedback and more reliable input means I don't have to constantly multitask half a task worth of attention onto making sure the input I think I'm doing went off as intended, which makes it easier to concentrate on the main task, which reduces the build up of fatigue, which reduces the rate a…
By my read y'all need more practice typing, not a fancy expensive ergo keyboard. Other than the occasional hand cramps this lifelong nerd doesn't have any of those problems on this old, mushy MS natural.
I'm simply a mechanical keyboard user, I have a few trusty Filcos that I use and I will sometimes buy a keycap set and wait 1 year for it[1]; I don't have the courage to build custom keyboards. However I do derive a vicarious pleasure looking at the build logs and end results shared by others, this post included. The two best places I've found to follow are the /r/mechanicalkeyboards[2] subreddit and the geekhack.org…
Maybe that's just me, but I get really annoyed by other people using (freakishly loud) mechanical keyboards in the office. It disrupts me from doing my work and some keyboards even penetrante my Bose QC ii with quiet music on...
There are also silent versions of tactile and linear switches.
Clicky switches are inappropriate in every office, and silent switches may be preferred in a particularly quiet office. Typical keyboards (Dell, Apple) fall somewhere between the tactile/linear and silent switch mechanical keyboards.