Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander

My view on it is, a good keyboard will get several years of use out of it, the average yearly price isn't really that much. Second, it's something I'm touching several hours most days of my life. I'm using a keyboard more than I wear shoes personally (I do prefer the barefoot life, so I'm a bit odd there). I'm touching it more than my couch or my dining chairs or other things in my home. Isn't it worthwhile that it's comfortable and exactly what I want from it?

“Here’s a really nice split keyboard. But we’ve removed everything except the alphanumerics”

Whhhyyyy.

“Oh but it’s programmable. And you can have layers. And you can have macros”

Cool. I actually didn’t want any of that. I just wanted a single row of function keys. My Moonlander can somehow make space for a “meh” key, a “caps word” key, 3 keys in 2 variations for “change layer” but a play/pause/ volume keys are simply out of the question.

1) My space key is right CTRL when held down.

2) I have two keys for "", one on each thumb cluster, one is Alt when held down, the other is left CTRL.

3) Page up and down have their own keys on one of those clusters because I no longer needed them for the modifiers, and so page up and down are also home and end if they're held down.

4) Auto shift is on, and I've tuned to to eliminate most of the accidental shifts while keeping it relatively quick to type CONSTANT_VALUES (I actually still have shift keys in the usual positions but on the ergodox I have it feels like a big stretch to hit them and type so I use the auto-shift most of the time, but I do admit this is the convenience function I have the most love/hate relationship with)

5) The shift keys themselves give me open parentheses (left shift) and close parentheses (right shift) when double tapped.

The only chording I have to do these days (that isn't normal keyboard shortcuts) is I have a dedicated key to switch to a layer for FN keys when held down. And the reality is I could (and should) probably map the number keys to be FN keys when double tapped since I don't think I ever hold an FN key down.

This[1] isn't my most current layout (missing the home/end on the pageup/down buttons) but it's pretty much what I've landed on after about a year of using one of these. And realistically there are unused keys there I could remap still. The CTRL where the capslock key would be is never used in favor of the thumb cluster versions, the left and right CTRL keys on the tops of the two thumb clusters are leftovers from older layouts and unused right now. I've never used the "Meh" key or the "'" and "Capslock" keys in the lower left. The "Command-enter" and "[" and "]" keys in the lower right are another leftover from an older layout that are also unused now. So lots of room to play around still.

Not saying you should definitely switch, there are still some things that I'm not 100% happy with (those inner symbol keys are a stretch sometimes and depending on what code I'm writing feel like I could move them around) and getting used to the ortholinear layout is a whole thing on its own. But if it's something that interests you, maybe that layout can help you find a good starting point.

[1]: https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez-st/layouts/wzKWq/latest/...

I have the UHK 60 and I really like it, except as you mentioned no function keys.

The software is pretty good, includes a little DSL and you can do pretty much anything you want.