The Best Keyboard for Developers With a Major Flaw 

OMG THE BEST COMMENT

I use the Wooting HE60 (wiating fore the HE80). It came with a complete set of keycaps and all keys are programable, so you could easily switch single keys to your liking. It should be the same with the Keychron.

@@gucky4717 but there is no key to set it to End and INSERT! I need all the 6 buttons pgup, pgdown, ins, del home, end. With this wonderful keyboard you can never have both the fish and th bowl. Its just stupid.

@@j7m7f The three buttons on top of the numpad are generic keys that can be programmed and otherwise have no function. You can easily make those your dedicated end/insert keys. I have the southpaw version and can make my numpad useful function keys if i need to.

@@j7m7f I mean, you can replace the 3 above the numblock with end and insert for example. You just need to switch the keys in software. Many custom keyboards can do that.

@@gucky4717 WOW! This changes everything! What a convinient and ergonomic place for End and Insert keys! These should be as far as possible from Home and Del, just to not press them instead. Missing labels will not be a problem after few years... Not even mentioning missing print screen, scroll lock and break - every one uses them so often that he always knows which one is which without written labels, right? Instead we get wonderfull square, circle and triangle keys. I'm sure there is a convinient way to go arrount this challenge (surely not an issue) by assigning all these missing keys to challenging combos like triangle long press or circle double press. Ergonomics level - professional. If every programmer learns to master this keyboard, he will never want to go for a standard keyboard. More. He wont be able to.

Good suggestions! For increasing font size, I always use the keyboard shortcuts, but I’ll try using it for scrolling. 😎

Hope you enjoy it!

😁

The best keyboard by far

glove80, kinesis 360 ?

I believe the voyager is not "ortholinear", but "column stagered", like most split ergonomic keyboard. So you are wrong, it is 3 words 🤪 Corne 42 low profile for myself. 😉

I got the Glove80 and the palmrest is a bit too short for me. Also, the white switches are quite loud, and they sadly offer no Sunsets out of the box. (Which they should, IMHO)

@@matthiasschuster9505 I’m the kinesis fan. I don’t like the lightness of the glove80, the small everything. I would say the glove80 is a split ergo travelling keyboard, but the kinesis is a daily home office rockstar

Also, Scroll/Lock is missing - useful for pausing stdout as Linux boots.

@@wizardfix This may be a bit of an RTFM moment, really depends on how you feel about pressing the Fn key. Fn + Home = End (so intuitive, not!), but I find that it works for me. In terminals ^S to stop and ^Q to continue is/was the old-school way of dealing with the boot scroll issue, whatever keyboard you use they are always available. Or you can bind one of the macro keys. Finally, if you don't like stretching you fingers for ESC, ^[ is the same, at least under linux - windows seems to use the keycodes.

Haha, always happy to serve 😬

I have a trackpad to the left of the keyboard that I use mostly for scrolling!

I don't think it's that clear-cut. I go back and forth between my Planck (columnar) and laptop keyboard, and I didn't really notice a difference is comfort. I prefer the Planck because of my customised layout, but that's about it.

@@maleldil1 the plank isn't a good example of an ergonomic keyboard. A row staggered keyboard with an angle mod layout would be better than a plank. Now if the plank were split in half, that would be unarguably better. It's extremely clear cut if you just look at ur hands and their position when placed on a keyboard. There's little point in a non split ortholinear, and little point on a split row stagger, but a split ortholinear (or better yet columnar) is waaay more convenient than any other alternative. I'd guess a key well would make it even more convenient, but I haven't had the opportunity to try that

Simple: because they're standard. If I get one of those weirdly shaped ergonomical keyboards, I might be able to type imperceptibly faster after retraining. But at the expense of my keyboard being the only keyboard I can comfortably type on. Whenever I need to work on someone else's computer, or on a laptop, it will be an uncomfortable experience. Whereas if I stick to standard keyboards, I'm not really missing out on much, but I'll be fluent on most keyboards I encounter in the wild. Besides, I'm a developer, not a typist. Most of my work is thinking and ingesting caffeine; a 2% increase in typing speed isn't going to impact my productivity in the slightest. Same reason I stick to the AZERTY layout which is the standard in my country, even though some symbols apparently are slightly easier to type on QWERTY, and even though some people swear that Dvorakis where it's really at. Again: if I switch to Dvorak, it will be a miserable experience while retraining, and my typing speed will take a serious hit until I rewire those neurons. And that's assuming I can even reach, let alone surpass, my current level of keyboard proficiency, because these neural patterns have been laid down and well maintained for over 3.5 decades by now. Then, if I need to do some work on someone else's PC, or help them with something, it will be a miserable experience again. Because I've overridden that muscle memory with the one that's fluent in Dvorak. So I stick to what's the default and what everyone else uses. If these keyboards would be so bad for us as some young kids desperately want us to believe in order to justify their expensive purchase, I think I would've noticed after 37 years of typing, including on _mechanical typewriters..._ That's why I abhor various types of "compact" keyboards that shuffle the keys around to make them more portable, it's why I abhor laptop keyboards post the Thinkpad T420/W520/x220 era, and why I stay the f* away from all these weird "keyboards" larping as spaceships. I don't mind extra buttons above the regular function keys area, I don't mind KeyChron's knob or the "playstation keys" above the numerical keypad; those are just additions that don't interfere with the rest of the keyboard. But both my Keychron V6 and V3 follow the bog-standard keyboard layout we've literally been using for decades and don't require me to re-learn how to type.

It's because my keyboard layout is not available for literally 98% of those ortholinear keyboards. A vast majority of those assume you use QWERTY or DVORAK, but ISO layouts are usually lagging behind quite far. I've seen some and tried a few and really didn't like the way they feel. I'm more dominant typing with my left hand so forcibly splitting that evenly will actually slow me down quite rapidly. There's several reasons why people don't want to use those keyboards. Needless to say the usual 400$ price tag for stylishness also sets a precedent. On top of all of that, they usually have proprietary switches and/or just look like someone sneezed a booger on your desk.

@@EvenTheDogAgrees the main purpose of an ergonomic keyb is comfort, not speed. But yeah, those are all valid arguments. Everyone is built different. I only turned to getting a split keyboard when my wrists began to hurt, and it helped. I just wish some sort of ergonomics became the standard so everyone could enjoy it without the drawbacks of using smth nobody else uses. And yeah, that's real. While I can still type on a normal qwerty keyboard - I'm at around 50wpm with fairly low accuracy, but it's still worth it if you work remote, imo