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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

To me, making the keyboard more useful is much more about changing the shape of the keyboard than remapping a bunch of keys. An ergo shape and putting more functionality on the thumbs (see the Moonlander for an example, but there are a number of keyboards that do this) has done more to improve my keyboarding experience than twiddling what Control does.

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> To me, making the keyboard more useful is much more about changing the shape of the keyboard than remapping a bunch of keys.

I totally agree. One big issue is that many work on laptops and cannot / won't carry an ergo keyboard around.

The second best I found, besides having an ergo keyboard, is to use an actual japanese keyboard: laptops with japanese keyboard can easily be found / shipped. You can have a Mac laptop with a japanese keyboard, for example.

And thanks to the narrow spacebar on japanese keyboards and the additional modifiers, you get more modifiers and they're easier to reach.

So I use a japanese keyboard even though I'm not japanese.

> So I use a japanese keyboard even though I'm not japanese.

Same!

I think not working on a laptop will give far greater ergonomic gains than any amount of keyboard remapping.

There's pretty active "ortholinear keyboard" community that has boards for basically any shape you really want. It's not a horrible way to get started with PCB design either. I have... too many keyboards now, most of which ortholinear. The most important thing for me being split, it helps immensely with wrist pain. I might find myself picking up a moonlander at some point here too, they look really nice and the high adjustability is pretty nice

I am an advocate for ortholinear boards. I have used simple 4x12 split boards (Let’s Split/Levinson) since 2017 and haven’t had any pain or other issues with my wrists.

It is pretty easy to build your own now as there are hot swap PCBs that don’t require soldering.

The worst part of having a small orthro board is staring at the hundred nice looking keycaps that have no home on your board after buying a set and putting on your base 48 keys.

I started with a Let's Tango (basically, a Let's Split derivative with a nice aluminum case) but have since moved to a mix of Corne and Boardsource's Lulu (Lily58 derivative). 40% split is a sweet spot for me.

I hear you about the keycaps. My solution to this is to just bulk order plain PBT keycaps so it doesn't feel as bad when you have spares, but it certainly doesn't look as good. It also kind sucks that not every profile works well with non-staggered layouts.

Still working on wrist pain though. I think I can attribute it to my slightly too high desk (which is unfortunately not adjustable).

Instead of adjusting desk height, you can adjust chair height. (Add a footstool if necessary.)

Chair is as high up as it'll go. Footstool is a good idea, I'll look into that

> putting more functionality on the thumbs

That's why I like Mac keyboards. Cmd is right under your thumb. I did the same for my Linux machine, so win/alt/ctrl instead of ctrl/win/alt. It's a game changer and doesn't require any hardware modification.

Thumb keys are the most underrated ergo keyboard feature. The thumb (and thumb knuckle) clusters on my Keyboardio Model1 are the best part of its design.

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