121–130 of 177 posts
Disclosure I run a small store that sells dactyl keyboards[1]. I've had several people who told me they had discomfort with Ergodox, Moonlander and Kinesis but found the Dactyl quite comfortable.
How are these split keyboards for gaming? I guess not great in many fast paced FPS or MOBAs which is a bit of a deal breaker for me. The size of the Kinesis Advantage is another big problem in gaming I reckon, with very little space left for the mouse - I have a full keyboard with numpad and I'm already thinking of going tenkeyless for more space. EDIT: ah... nevermind, these comments have convinced me to splurge on…
Specifically for shooters I've found it pretty great though. I usually only need the left half of the keyboard anyway, since the right hand almost exclusively uses the mouse. Having a split keyboard means I can push the right half back and have more space for the mouse.
I am, however, also the kind of person that rebinds 80% of hotkeys in games to what I like, so I will always go to the trouble of binding every single important action to a key on the left half of the keyboard in shooters. So take that with a grain of salt.
How are these split keyboards for gaming? I guess not great in many fast paced FPS or MOBAs which is a bit of a deal breaker for me. The size of the Kinesis Advantage is another big problem in gaming I reckon, with very little space left for the mouse - I have a full keyboard with numpad and I'm already thinking of going tenkeyless for more space. EDIT: ah... nevermind, these comments have convinced me to splurge on…
How are these split keyboards for gaming? I guess not great in many fast paced FPS or MOBAs which is a bit of a deal breaker for me. The size of the Kinesis Advantage is another big problem in gaming I reckon, with very little space left for the mouse - I have a full keyboard with numpad and I'm already thinking of going tenkeyless for more space. EDIT: ah... nevermind, these comments have convinced me to splurge on…
These days I think that there are so many good community designed keyboards that it behooves anyone who has the notion they'd like something better than a standard layout keyboard to do a bit of research and testing. For any keyboard layout it is fairly trivial to make a printout and stick it to your desk to get an impression of how it fits your hand size/shape and your preferred resting/neutral position. There's a good layout comparison tool which makes it trivial to narrow in on your preference as well [0].
Recently I've found Ben Vallack [1] to be an excellent resource on keyboard customization and his philosophy echoes my own, though he shows much more dedication to the craft and exploration of keyboarding than I could ever hope or wish to. He has an excellent series on designing and making your own keyboard [2], as well as well thought out explanations and explorations of creating and learning personalized keyboard layouts [3][4]. His more general explorations of usability in computing and beyond have been inspiring as well [5].
0: https://github.com/jhelvy/splitKbCompare
1: https://www.youtube.com/c/BenVallack
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKfeJrRIcxw&list=PLCZYyvXAdQpte8dkCPz72m_O-Od9fVEqD
3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI-a64EVPPU
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ8FRwOzhU
5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA_GUYS8UJg&list=PLCZYyvXAdQpvysng5wxGkrnIoFtvPibXMAs someone who owns the Moonlander, ZSA's proprietary successor to the Ergodox EZ, I consider the soon-to-be-released Dygma Defy ( https://dygma.com/pages/defy ) to be superior to either in every respect save perhaps for the maturity of its firmware platform.
However, what's missing, for me, is the Fx row or direct access media keys. I know about layers, not moving the fingers too far, etc, and think this is a great approach for when I'm in "full-on working mode".
But I oftentimes find myself wanting to push one specific "function" key when one of my hands is busy / dirty (think eating an apple or similar). I would rather not have to do weird pinky gymnastics or push multiple keys just to trigger one function. Plus, these things are already massive enough that one more row would probably make little to no difference.
Those are also not things I'd need to do all day every day, so sacrificing a few buttons from the thumb clusters doesn't seem right, either.
Does anybody know something similar, with a trackball? I got interested in these split ergo keyboards when I saw the new Kinesis models [0] but unfortunately they don't ship to my location. I came across the Charybdis [1] and I loved the idea but I'm not capable enough to assemble it myself and the guy making them has a many week lead time, so I'd love an equivalent. [0]: https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/advantage3…
The UHK has a trackball-module. https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/product/trackball
My filterable gallery of split keyboards is here, should anyone want a quick overview of the range of keyboards that are available. https://aposymbiont.github.io/split-keyboards/