Yes. I'd swear that people that unfortunately fall into RSI also fall into a negative cycle of moving less and favoring a static position at all levels - fingers, wrists, shoulders.

Our bodies love movement and it's often a recipe for solving all sorts of issues.

There's a lot of fun to be had by replacing the spacebar with four keys.

Mine are tab, esc, space, backspace... plus layer shenanigans (https://configure.zsa.io/planck-ez/layouts/jDnba/latest/0)

A split keyboard does a good job of enforcing stricter adherence to the home keys so you end up getting quite accurate at the special functions too since everything is within reach. I think extra thumb buttons on a non-split keyboard gets you all the same benefits, I'd love to see more boards explore that.

Programmability is really an awesome feature for this very reason. Even with a traditional layout, you can be really creative and improve the ergonomics: tap/hold mod for the spacebar, remap caps lock to do all kinds of stuff...

I have RSI issues with my wrists. It really helps to have split ortholinear keyboards, if only because I have trained on them specifically to type without moving my wrists whatsoever (using a miryoku layout), while old habits persist on a standard QWERTY TKL. Of course, it also helps to put on really soft-springed keys (like kailh silver) — it's self evident that softer keys are easier to press.

I had initially thought that it'd be hard to use both kinds of keyboards at once, but my muscle memory for either seems unaffected when I use the other one.

Conversely, I'm totally sold on it. The shoulder-hunching thing is so real.

The thing I thought was ergonomic BS was the benefits of columnar/ortho layouts; everyone talked about how your fingers just moved vertically and it was so much better for them, and I rolled my eyes. But dang if it hasn't proved to be meaningfully true for me, too -- when I have to type on a legacy keyboard, I can clearly feel the pain in my fingers. (The disclaimer here is that my fingers are totally screwed up; if you don't feel pain normally, this probably matters less.)

I included ZSA's other boards (Moonlander and Voyager) since they seemed to have superseded the Ergodox in popularity. But yes, it definitely was one of the first to come out. ZSA is still a company paving ways though!

I feel like the Ergodox was traditionally a lot of people's first wacky split keyboard -- but for those that stuck around, it was rarely their last. These days, there are so many better options that it's hard to recommend Ergodox despite its historic importance.

> Also don’t bother with dvorak, qwerty is 80/20 pareto stuff. Just isn’t worth it compared to returns.

I wouldn't specifically recommend other people learn Dvorak, but I switched to it when I was in my early teens (~25 years ago) and I feel pretty great about the returns I got from that.

My kid sure isn't getting qwerty as their default keyboard.

I think there's something to the ortholinear thing, I find it quite uncomfortable to hit z, x, and c on a standard row-staggered keyboard.

Also It's nice to have a 10-key at home row (5 goes with k).

My caps lock key is swapped with the left control key as God intended.

Dvorak works really well for me. (Though you might want to pick Colemak or Neo2 these days.) I use Dvorak on both my Kinesis Advantage and on 'normal' keyboards like on a laptop.

It's not so much about speed, as about comfort.

I'm a native speaker of Russian, using Ergodox as my only keyboard for over 5 years. Here is my layout: https://configure.zsa.io/ergodox-ez/layouts/XEYyW/latest/0

> The issue with kinesis and all those nice small symmetrical keyboards is that not every alphabet is as short as English.

> Russian, for example, has 33 letters.

Ironically, the biggest enthusiast of these splits I know in real life (he owns a kinesis) is a slavic guy, speaks both Ukranian and Russian, but I suppose he's typing in English for most of the day at his job, however I know he uses layering for the cyrillic.

I've been inputting Devanagari with a 30% ortho keyboard lately using QMK. ऐसे अति मुश्किल नहीं है । I have an extra layer for nicher inputs just as I do with my usual Roman text. I'm not aware of any writing systems that normally require multiple layers. The most complex I can think of is Hangul, and they all should translate pretty directly to a smaller keyboard.

love the microsoft ergonomic kb, I have the surface grey one as my main kb (I need the full layout for various 3d program shortcuts annoyingly) but it really does feel great to type on despite not being "mechanical"

I love my uhk, I really wish the 60v2 had bluetooth. I really don't wanna fork over the money for a 80v2. :(

I actually want to try that just to see the looks on people's faces when I'm typing on two keyboards. It's the opposite of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ

I use a split keyboard, and I definitely don't want my two halves to be as far apart as the setup you describe would put them.

It's an interesting hack, though.

> Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished.

The elephant in the room with the 'ergonomics' argument for split keyboards is that you get a marginal improvement using the keyboard this way and ten times the effect by just getting up and going for a five minute walk every hour or so.

The same goes for mousephobia, which overlaps with split layout users. I still use neovim every day, but the quickest cure for the CTS symptoms that 'ergonomic' keyboard purist vim users seem to get much more than their IDE coworkers is just moving your hand to do something other than type in the exact same position for hours on end - something like grabbing a mouse. I strongly suspect that CTS in software engineers will go down in the next coming years as coding agents become more common and SWEs pick their hands up more (or just physically type less).

The same goes for back pain, if you're otherwise ablebodied enough to start resistance training it's infinitely more beneficial than whatever chair you're looking at.

Curious if there are any split keyboards with "overlap", eg, the center of the keyboard is duplicated on both sides

That's true for the "Path 1" keyboards this article talks about. The other ones definitely take some time.

Thanks for mentioning it, I included the Kinesis Freestyle (traditional split) but I think it's worth including the Advantage. Added!

Probably not a great suggestion these days. Back when I first got carpal tunnel / RSI (1995), I was using an IBM model M - which I loved the feel of. I had a dream of cutting a keyboard in two and hanging two halves off my chair so I could drop my arms to my sides and type that way.

Anyway, after trying a couple of things, Microsoft Natural (the original with backtilt) saved my programming career. I still have "weak" wrists/fingers/forearms, but it's rarely painful enough for me to have to stop working. Adding in some stretches generally makes it so I can survive.

I can type on a normal keyboard for maybe 15 minutes and maybe an hour on a laptop before I just can't anymore. I can generally go most of the day on my Microsoft Natural. Retraining from a regular keyboard layout (took typing in high school - yes, I'm ancient) wasn't hard at all - it's basically the same.

Sure, it's technically not a "split" keyboard - it's still one thing. These days, I buy used examples off ebay, usually 3 at a time, and on some, the typing action is horrible - but I still have a couple of examples that are usable. And I had to find the right ps2->usb adapters for my work setup. If I ever totally run out, my professional coding days are probably done.

Crazy suggestion, just connect two normal keyboards. Particularly if the left one is numpad-less you’ll get much of the idea for sure.

They might be a smidgeon further apart than might be ideal, there’s some ugly duplication… which happens to enforce a minimum distance… just get that shoulder opened up and start evaluating. It’s certainly likely to be more optimal than the status quo.

Might need Karabiner on macOS to keep shortcuts working.

The Keychron V10 perhaps? It has a split layout but doesn't have physically separate halves.

Membrane is not inherently more ergonomic, the "much less pressure" seems untrue since apparently it takes 50g of force to activate, while you can easily find switches that activate at less than 30g (I used a 37g switch myself).

About travel distance, this is also something you can adjust, with the low profile switches having less than 3mm travel distance.

Heck, even HE keyboards can set their actuation down to 0.1mm, if that's your thing.

My kingdom for a split keyboard with a traditional layout. I have no interest in chording, layers, or having fewer keys. No numpad if you must cut something. I just want to spread my arms without any additional novelty. No shortage of “vertical” desk space, give me that F-row

I have multiple of the MSFT Sculpt keyboards. It's wireless. Comes with separate wireless number pad. Now produced by Incase. It has Windows key, but it's easy to remap.

Official name now : Incase Designed By Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Wireless TKL Keyboard

https://www.incase.com/products/sculpt-ergonomic-keyboard

(In Canada, only available at Bestbuy)

I forget the name of the layout (the board is a Lily58), but my keyboard does away with the staggered key spacing and has keys aligned vertically with a subtle bowling. You're usually pressing keys with your pad, not the sides or tips, and I suspect it would be even better with flat low profile keycaps.

There are some styles of "chording" keyboards that might help too, and some that would be way worse. Chording keyboard are also wildly different to regular keyboards, totally alien by comparison to just splitting a keyboard.

A split keyboard might still bring you some relief. Modifiers/enter/backspace/etc are usually moved away from your weakest fingers (pinkies) to your strongest (thumbs). I have Ctrl, Alt, backspace, delete, space, enter and shift all on my thumb clusters.

Here's an example of what that might look like: https://kinesis-ergo.com/wp-content/uploads/KB360-GBR_FRONT-... (though in the default configuration, shift is still on your pinky; you can customize this on most keyboards, or on OS level).

The rabbit hole goes very deep. Another option is home row mods: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods. A combination of thumb clusters and home row mods can reduce your finger strain a lot.

Give svalboard a look. Might be some old threads on here about it.

https://svalboard.com/

Ok, fellow old hacker here. I have a similar problem and I found that a lot of the hand pain was from mouse/trackpad usage. My hands have been a lot happier since going to a trackball because I don't do nearly as much gripping and pressing.

The angle / position your wrist is when your fingers need to do these lateral movements could be more or less taxing depending.

By what metric makes a keyboard "best"? It's crazy subjective, and objectively diverse as we are all shaped differently with different levels of injury/wear etc.

Who cares if it's "better" if it's working better for you?

I can speak anecdotally, at least.

My shoulders are pretty wide for my frame. When using most laptop keyboards and many standard keyboards, I have to tuck my shoulders in and twist my wrists. This was causing some serious pain and tension in my neck, shoulders, and wrists, likely leading toward carpal tunnel.

I made two different changes in succession that helped greatly (and I don't remember the order now):

1. With a split keyboard, the halves could be placed so my wrists are straight and my arms hold at shoulder-width, and this rapidly reduced the amount of tension I was experiencing and gradually eased my wrist issues. Tenting the keyboard and getting a vertical mouse helped as well, but I'd rate those as minor improvements, especially since I aim not to drive with the mouse as much.

2. With Colemak layout, I was able to gradually transition from QWERTY (there's a series of AHK scripts I found at the time that basically rotated triples of keys). This helped reduce wrist strain at the hand level.

Maybe it depends on your individual anatomy, and the sensitivity of it to stresses?

Anyway, the fact alone that you have less bend in the joints of your hands, if used right, seems to avoid all sorts of carpal-tunnel syndrome?

for me its the outside angle between my wrist and my forearm. When I any of my splits it removes the angle entirely, and the pain for me is gone.

completely anecdotally (sample size of one!) but I found big improvement in comfort and posture when i moved to the kinesis ergo (split, but joined) about 15 years ago.

Eventually I moved to a full split, positioned quite some distance apart (~25cm) and found that even more comfortable.

Always hard to know with stuff like this if you are just imagining it, but for various reasons, I'm pretty convinced it was an improvement for me.

Yeah, it works great.

I just use whatever laptop/tablet-type thing I have at the time.

My proper desk set up is just so much better than anything portable (not just keyboard, but also monitors, trackball, lighting, etc.) that it's not really worth doing any "real" work on the go - so while I have a number of portable devices, they're effectively just for doing stuff that can't reasonably wait until back at my desk.

(For that matter, I've effectively ditched all of my "work-capable" portable devices - my largest-screen portable devices are a Chromebook and a 13" cell-connected iPad w/ Magic Keyboard. They're both very capable devices in their own rights, but I'm not going to try to do <day job work> on them.)

If you don't mind looking like a blade runner extra who's gone missing while working in public, there's not much difference carrying these around. The moonlander is a great portable option. Just slip it in your laptop bag.

I quite like it because it gives me a bit of flexibility on where I put them, and gives me a bit of extra room in the middle. Great for a small airport table or whatever, can even use them rested on your legs

I travel with my Ferris Sweep, 2.5" drive travel case is a perfect fit.

https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep

https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Waterproof-5-5x3-5x1-0inch-Acce...

Take a look at ZSAs oryx configurator for Voyager (52 keys) - you'll see some general configs and development ones etc.

In general, for my moonlander I would have the first layer with all the normal alpha numerics and a few symbols like <>?

But the second layer would contain most symbols, arranged/grouped in a manner which was natural for programming - e.g. grouping keys together like (), [], {},

Or prepare your soldering iron. Maybe both.