Tried MS Ergonomic Sculpt, and Truly Ergonomic. Suggestions?

[ReneFroger]

First, sorry for my poor English.

I'm a heavy Vim user. I used the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic, and fell in love with it.  The enlarged keys are great. After a half year, with long codings days, the non-deep depth of the keys were beginning to irritate me, I'm talking about the clichet keys by the way.  So I decided to buy a mechanical keyboard with cherry MX keys. After long search, I found a ergonomic one, the 'Truly Ergonomic'. The programmable spacebar (it's a splitted spacebar) is actually great. I remapped the right spacebar to alt, and the shift (where usually the capslock located is on normal keyboard) to control.

But I find the Truly Ergonomic too small. I would like to widen the keyboard. I feel that my arms are too close to each other. And the palm rest is too hard, surely when you compare it with Sculpt ergonomic.

So I'm deciding to bring the keyboard back, it's a expensive one by the way. I looked again to the Kinesis Freestyle.

There are 2 great pro's about that keyboard. 

-You can broaden the keyboard, in the order to get more gap between your arms.
-There is a soft palm rest.

But there are some serious cons too. 
-The keys are appearently not cherry MX switches, they're Rubber Dome, and what I'm reading, they don't feel great.
- The splitted spacebar is not suitable for remapping, it seems they're sending the same key code.

I found the other keyboards like ergodox and kinesis advantage too weird. So I'm wondering if the keyboards geeks under us could advice me some ergonomic keyboards with mechanical keys and programmable splitted
spacebar? 

Thanks in advance for your reply! 

[davkol]

ErgoDox

[vvp]

Don't worry about a weird look. In case of Ergodox / Kinesis Advantage the weird part is good.

[SonOfSonOfSpock]

I have a Freestyle, while the switches aren't mechanical, they are a step above most rubber dome keyboards.

The Matias ErgoPro (http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/) is coming out in December. I think the spacebar will be remappable by dipswitch. If I remember correctly, there was a discussion here on Geekhack where Edgar Matias was asking for feedback on this.

[ReneFroger]

Everybody thanks for the replies. I still feel the Ergodox is way too high to for me. Just give it some years, to get accustomed to the idea.

Matias Ergopro seems interesting. But Matias said here:

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=53184.msg1185558#msg1185558

That the splitted spacebar will not be programmable or remap-able. So that means I must look further for a alternative one.

[jacobolus]

You can always try to find a used Cherry G80-5000, but they tend to go for $500+, and to make the spacebar programmable you might need to do some hardware hacking.

[caseyandgina]

Wish I could get my hands on a Truly Ergonomic!

[SonOfSonOfSpock]

Later in that discussion Matias says differently.

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=53184.msg1482812#msg1482812

You should contact him directly about this if you feel like it might make a good keyboard.

[ReneFroger]

I guess the chiclet keys are more useful for me. I found the mechanical keys too deep and wobbly (it was on Truly Ergonomic with MX brown keys).

But I dislike the bottoming out all the time. Is there any way to 'cushion' the chiclet keys?

[qihqi]

You might want to try topre keys.

On side note, as a TEK user for two years and just have gotten an Ergodox, it is awesome.

[conandy]

check out this thread for the Axios project (previously called Nexus).  Crowdsupply campaign should be coming sometime in the next couple months, we all hope.

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=44940.0;topicseen

Should offer everything you need, once it becomes a reality.