As a climber and a developer, my forearms see a fair bit of (over)use. I think a split keyboard will help with this, as will real keys (and not the short-press keys on knockoff Apple keyboards). Why test this out with a $300 keyboard? Because it’s super cool! I don’t have the time or space to build my own, so the Ergodox seems like the best option.
I really like the idea of a split Kinesis-style keyboard like this, but I think I’ll take my productivity shakeups one at a time.
Benchmarks
I took a typing test with my regular keyboard the day my Ergodox showed up. I clocked 74 wpm; this seemed slow compared to other tests I’ve taken, but we’ll call it a fair benchmark.
On the Ergodox, I only got 34. This was a plain-English test; I suspect that a test that included additional characters I would be nearly-helplessly slow.
To stay sane, I kept my regular keyboard between the Ergodox halves in case I was in a hurry (or, as was often the case, that I had mis-configured a key that I needed). The ability to hold a key to auto-Shift is pretty cool. Auto-shift for numbers is immediately terrific, but it’s unintuitive for letters at first, particularly in vim-style contexts. I added the “Autoshift Toggle” button to my keyboard to avoid making myself crazy.
The main struggle is that my daily workflow is i3, tmux, and vim; due to the near-endless configurability of keymaps for each of these already, the Ergodox actually increases opportunity for confusion. In addition, I use IntelliJ for Java, which has a whole other set of keybindings (that I don’t know very well to begin with).
After a few days of using the Ergodox, I had settled on a layout that I like (at least for now). I still get lost periodically; in particular, there are a few key combinations that seem logical on a regular keyboard that require some mental gymnastics to figure out on the Ergodox. Each time I find one of these, I try to move keys around and recompile the layout.