Love mine. Make sure you have fellow appreciative keyboard nerds around you in the office, muggles will definitely complain.
smarter people did harder work in rooms full of loud loud keyboards.
Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
161–170 of 191 posts
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#162Moved on to Topre switches. I don't miss model M; pre-topre mechanical is just obsolete technology now.
I wrote my dissertation on a HHKB2, and I use a realforce in my office now. It doesn't look "weird" but it's an absolute delight to type on.
Would love to take a look at that paper if you're willing to share :)
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#163I just notice today when I looked at their web site again that they also have a Mini M
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still prefer the F to the M.. however I can't really type of qwerty boards anymore for any length of time without risking RSI. Kinesis Advantage for me for the rest of my life.
+1 to Kinesis Advantage. I prefer the "original" / non-360 for its advantage (sorry) of just working as soon as it's connected to a computer. The 360 needs to pair it's halves that results in a disconnect/reconnect dance which annoys me a lot. I assume it's only due to my setup, where I have two laptops connected by a USB-C to a monitor, all accessories are in turn connected to the monitor.
yeah no, the left/right pairing has been, in the past, kinda wonky. Not a show stopper for me as it only seemed to happen when I turned the board actually off... which is not very often.
Newer versions of the firmware seems to have mostly resolved this. You just need to make sure you turn on the left half slightly before the right half.
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about those little USB fans pointed at your hands?
They all died, those dinky things are not made for continuous, long-term operation. I'm pretty sure some of them fried a few ports/controllers, too.
Noctua sells 5v variants of their fans, they come with a USB adapter.
You may need to rig something to keep it upright (or at least finger safe?)
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#166Not sure if this breaks HN's rules, but I'd love to hear anyones suggestions on favorite split keyboards. There's a lot of homebrew boards out there that're very small/light but I have sausage fingers and the demeanor of an orangutan. https://www.amazon.com/KINESIS-Advantage360-Professional-Erg... ^closest I've found, but $$$
I've been using a Matias Ergo Pro Programmable for the past three-or-so years and it's been excellent; all the wrist pain I had been experiencing after typing ceased once I started using it, and that's held true since.
The switches are tactile but quiet. The keycaps are well-sized with a pleasant texture. It's very weighty, and never moves. It has arrow-keys and Home/End/PgUp/PgDn. The cable that joins the two halves is just a standard 3.5mm TRRS audio cable. The USB cable is detachable.
It does have a few flaws: the Escape key's awkwardly out-of-the-way, the same goes for the Delete key; the fabric used for the palm-rests is sort of difficult to clean; very rarely, a pressed key will get stuck and will repeat after it's been depressed.
I've also tried the Kinesis Freestyle 2... I'm much less of fond it, it might just be the worst keyboard I've used (especially relative to its price). Its switches are bad, even by the standards of membrane switches—to get keypresses to reliably register I have mash the keys so forcefully that it ends up being louder than the mechanical Ergo Pro. The keycaps are small, with a texture that's unpleasant to the touch. The cable that joins the two halves is proprietary, and the cable that comes out of the box is too short at 9", the 20" cable costs 20% of what the keyboard does and is still too short to fully utilise the split. The USB cable isn't detachable. Something about the way the right half is laid out makes it difficult to get your hand in position to use it. The Escape key's really out-of-the-way, as is the Fn key. Though, it does have a lot of macro keys.
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're using a PC you can likely just get 2 keyboards. It'll use a little more desktop space but you can put them wherever you want. I've found that the mac doesn't respect "left keyboard shift right keyboard letter a for a capital A" which is annoying.
For most people, "wherever you want" is going to be with the outside edges a bit wider than your shoulders and vaguely parallel to a little diagonal. That's not possible with really any pair of full keyboards I've ever had.
I just moved them around until it was comfortable; it ended up with them being a bit further apart than shoulder width, the keyboards certainly weren't close to bumping into each other even though they were standard garbage 101 key USB business keyboards; I think they end up about a foot apart at the closest. Give it a try.
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#168I used one for years and liked it, but, after switching to an ergonomic keyboard, I wouldn't want to primarily move back to a standard one.
https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/product/ortholinear-split-er... you could have both
Three things worth noting:
1. It's out of stock, and I don't know if Ellipse is going to make more. 2. Even if it were "in stock", it would take months (possibly/probably more than a year) to get. 3. It requires two USB cables. This is stated plainly on the site, but it's buried in the numbered list of "important notes".
I have one. Unfortunately, I haven't used it for more than a few minutes due to that last point. I had envisioned using it on my work system, but requiring two USB cables kills it for me. I don't know if the Mac is unique in this, but it only registers modifier keys for the keyboard issuing them—that is, holding shift, cmd, etc. on one side of the keyboard doesn't work for the other side. For instance, cmd+o doesn't work unless the cmd key is on the right as well.
There are utilities you can install to get this functionality working, but I can't install them on my work machine (and even on my personal system, I couldn't get them to work, so YMMV). I had high hopes for this keyboard, but it's likely I'll sell it due to problems with my setup.
Mechanically, it's exactly what you'd expect: a Model F in a reasonably (if outdated) ergonomic package. While a leap ahead of standard layouts, the Ergodox has always had some pretty big flaws, especially in the thumb cluster keys.
In terms of feeling, the Model F is definitely different than the Model M. Some days I'd call it better; some days I'd call it worse. Claims that it's night-and-day are exaggerated, IMO. (I have extensive experience with the New Model F F62 and various Model Ms over the years, from old IBMs to modern Unicomps.)
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a number of options for replacing the control board on the kinesis advantage (or advantage2) with one that runs QMK, providing the same sort of configurability as the ergodox, and the advantage 360 pro runs on ZMK.
I can suggest the following, I had three advantage 2s before picking up my 360pro. I modded all of the 2s with the following boards: * https://github.com/kinx-project/kint - Great board, requires usb of course. Programmable with QMK. * https://github.com/wizarddata/Blue-Wizard-Mod - Doesn't support QMK but does support ZMK but is bluetooth. Great board. I picked the kint up on some pcbway type service, the blue wizar…
not ebay, etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/926272734/kinesis-advantage-blu...
Re: Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was doing quite a bit of shopping for a split ergo about a year ago. My main contenders ended up being: - Glove80 - Advantage360 - ZSA Moonlander - ZSA Ergodox - Various alice layout KB's (not full split. ex: Keychron K15) - Custom building some sort of sofle or dactyl - ZSA recently came out with the voyager which looks essentially like a wired 65% sofle. In the end I went with the Glove80, which I _highly_ recomm…
I keep saying I should trying the Moonlander, but I never get around to it. The ErgoDox thumb clusters were too much of a stretch for my thumbs - I think the adjustable ones on the moonlander would help Edit: A Dactyl with a trackball would be pretty sweet too. They seem to be getting a bit easier to buy now too.
The thumb cluster design was one of the reasons I went with the Glove80. Moonlander, ErgoDox, and even Advantage 360 thumb clusters seem harder to hit than the Glove80's, though I do wish there was some option to use 1.5u keys on the Glove80 thumb cluster.