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Comment by cholantesh | Hacker News Reader

The original title is pretty clickbaity (which, I suppose, is fitting). The switches are great, but so long as your arms are forced together as they are by most keyboards, you are still doing untold damage to your upper body. I'll stick with my Kinesis Advantage.

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I appreciate the effort that people are putting into the switches themselves, but agreed, updating the layout is where the real gains are found. I've used Kinesis keyboards for 20 years--I now own four of them of various vintage--and I'm surprised they never found broader adoption. There's so many benefits:

- Key well is cupped so all key rows are near-equal distance; you don't need to move your hand around.

- Key columns are vertical, no angular stretches for your fingers.

- Modifiers are right under your thumbs, no hand movement required. Emacs users rejoice!

- You can remap those keys under your thumbs. I remapped one to control-space ("set mark" in emacs), which is lovely.

Adaptation really isn't that hard. Unlike "big" changes such as switching to Dvorak layout, adapting to the Kinesis Advantage doesn't take much training. It took me about 2 weeks to get back to speed, and much of that was because I was a sloppy typist when I switched. (The Kinesis pretty much forces you to touch type correctly.) By contrast, switching to Dvorak took me about 2 months.

EDIT: for completeness, a couple disadvantages of the Kinesis: 1) Escape key is not mechanical, it's on a row of gummy-feeling function keys. vi/vim users will probably want to remap one of the thumb keys to escape. 2) It's not great for gaming, I still use a traditional-layout mechanical keyboard for games.

The kinesis is expensive. It's worth it for lots of people, but not everyone. And it's hard to say whether it'll be worth it for you without buying one. (They have a return policy, but a lot of people are going to be unwilling to take advantage of it. And with shipping costs, it might still be expensive, especially if you're international.)

As an aside, I believe recent models have mechanical esc and function keys.

Sure it's expensive, but we're talking about your primary input device which you use for hours every day. If your job is in front of a computer, do yourself a huge favor and get a decent keyboard, display, and chair. You also amortize that cost over a very long time--these keyboards last forever. My 20 year-old Kinesis (with a USB dongle) works just as good today as it did when I bought it.

But to your point, it's a leap that most people have to take on faith, as they probably can't find one to demo. I had the good fortune of having a coworker with one so I could try it first; a couple minutes with the Kinesis was all it took to sell me. The same's happened in my current office; now 4-5 people use them. But to the average person who can't try before they buy, it's a leap, and I'm sure that's hindered adoption significantly.

You're right on the current model's escape/function keys, looks like they're mechanical now--excellent! All of mine are older models.

>1) Escape key is not mechanical, it's on a row of gummy-feeling function keys.

The Advantage 2 resolves this issue. :) I'm looking forward to getting mine later this year.

For gaming, I use the Razer Orbweaver, but while playing Dark Engine games recently I found it problematic because there's not enough room for all the mappings I wanted to use (gadgets, special weapons, quicksaving/loading). The situation would probably be even worse with strategy games.

It really is amazing how much of a difference that contour style makes - I picked one up for long stretches of coding when I otherwise tend to develop "hunched-over-the-computer" syndrome. The pressure relief on the chest and shoulders is immense and it's hard not to have good posture when using it. It was so effective that I don't even need it anymore (is that ironic?), except now and then when sitting at a desk all day starts to feel uncomfortable.

I use a Kinesis Freestyle, but yeah I agree. It's hard to overstate how much better my wrists, elbows and shoulders feel after switching to a split keyboard years ago.

Ergodox and Mistel exists for those who like mechanical keyboards.

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