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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

With my hybrid work schedule I’m looking for more portability, and less keys. This isn’t for me, but neat.

I also use an ortho layout, but find the whole community trying to justify it as better for you ergonomically to be unconvincing. There’s little data that says ortho has any health benefits over staggered. We have data on the position and alignment of the wrist being the biggest factor, and you can achieve this with either style.

> This is the physical layout, so you see QWERTY here. I actually type on Colemak though!

How do you know if someone uses an alternative key layout? They’ll tell you.

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If you're looking for portability with ergonomics I've been very interested in following Ben Vallack's advice in this video https://invidious.weblibre.org/watch?v=iOupyi-lQZM, which is to take a small keyboard like the gergoplex[0] and strap it to your thighs with a giant rubber band.

You may also be interested in https://southpawdesign.net/collections/all as they have a few small, ergonomic keyboards.

[0]: https://www.gboards.ca/product/gergoplex-heavy

I've been looking for a gergoplex but gboards.ca has been down for a long time. If you read the later blog posts on web.archive it's a sad situation, I doubt it'll be back online.

> There’s little data that says ortho has any health benefits over staggered.

Sure.

But the standard row-stagger is asymmetrical; the way a hand types with the left hand is not mirrored by the right hand.

I'd be very surprised if that was as ergonomic as a symmetrical layout.

> But the standard row-stagger is asymmetrical; the way a hand types with the left hand is not mirrored by the right hand.

How is it asymmetrical? Unless you consider the right hand typing on the numpad/cursor keys.

On a QWERTY keyboard, think about the letters "I" and "E", which the middle fingers on your right and left hands respectively would hit. Both require your middle finger to reach up and slightly left. It's not a mirrored movement—both skew left. The stagger breaks symmetry of any non-home row finger movements.

I think I see it, it seems to me that my finger naturally wants to hit in between "E" and "R", but it hits exactly on top of "I".

So ortho fixes this, but could it then introduce problems for other pairs? It seems hard to believe that there is a layout which is 100% better for all combinations.

Regarding symmetry, our hands are already asymmetrical due to handiness (left-handed, right-handed), and the brain naturally adapts, and there is also the risk of Hawthorne effect if you A/B test ortho/staggered. Some real studies on layouts would really be useful.

Ortholinear can be interpreted as 0 stagger, but still takes time to adjust to. However, when I was using ortho at work and ANSI at home, it didn't take much effort for me to alternate.

Ortho layouts are also most often used on compact boards, and the Preonic (5x12 grid, '50%' form factor) is probably the most 'plug and use' friendly ortho I've come across.

Consider the index-finger columns:

On the LHS, the index-finger RFV. The finger rests on the homing key F, with R to the left.

On the RHS, the index-finger column is UJM. The finger rests on the homing key F, with U also to the left of F.

I'd consider (say) a Katana keyboard to have a symmetrical row-stagger.

Standard keyboards use a mix of 0.25u and 0.5u stagger, depending on the row.

The Zlant is a uniform-stagger board I got once as a fun project, but you'll see the stagger difference right away: https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/keyboards/zl...

> I'd be very surprised if that was as ergonomic as a symmetrical layout.

The body is complex, and movements build on top of that. It's hard to reason about it as a system in this way.

For now though, what matters is it's more fun to type on an ortholinear keyboard. I wish the focus was on that aspect and not health benefits until there's data.

:o) I can agree that a discussion about health benefits would be more compelling with data.

As an anecdote, I'll say I find my ortho keyboard using a Dvorak layout much more comfortable to type on than row-stagger QWERTY; and certainly looking at videos show that the latter looks much busier at the same WPM.

The main thing I'd argue is that many of the design features of a standard keyboard (asymmetry; big spacebar; row stagger, with different stagger for each row..) don't seem to be good design decisions compared to even a grid of keys all the same size.

> How do you know if someone uses an alternative key layout? They’ll tell you.

It is a post about a keyboard; if you don't want to hear about keyboard related topics, maybe consider reading different posts.

Pipe down, it's just a joke.

Yeah, a split keyboard and traveling back and forth is not so fun. When I was in the office full time it just stayed there, since 95% of my typing was done there. Now I am home the vast majority of the time, and it stays home. I just have a 60% keyboard I use for travel, not my favorite but it gets the job done and travels easy.

When I worked in an office, one of my favorite boards to bring to/from was a Tokyo60. 60% HHKB-ish layout, split backspace, ctrl-instead-of-caps, and a classy aluminum case.

If you're curious enough to get into designing your own, there are much simpler guides than the OP here, if you know what you want to accomplish.

I have no problem admitting my interest in ortho layouts is mostly an aesthetic preference.

At home where I can spread out I'm quite content with my Ergodox. But for travel, I find my 2x2u Preonic quite comfy... all the keys you need, none that you don't, with only a minimimum of layers needed.

I just bought cheap mechanical keyboard and left it at work

I bought an expensive mechanical keyboard and left it at work. (My current job would have paid for it, but it's from before that.)

I type at work far more than at home.

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