Well, just joined the forum here at GeekHack. My daily driver for the past 15 years was the Microsoft Ergonomic 4k and its predecessors. It was always good enough. Recently I decided to upgrade to a mechanical keyboard. The options for ergonomic mechanicals are limited and with my build a number fall off. My shoulders are too wide for my hands to be side by side.
The boards on my wish list were: Ergodox, Dactyl, TEK and the Kinesis Advantage. In the end I got meself a Kinesis. The main reasons were: I didn't want to build my own (yet), keywells and matrix layout really make sense and they are what I wanted. The hands are well separated. Other features such as the key wells, remapping and so forth are also a nice extra.
This keyboard has been my daily driver for the past 6 weeks and I am smitten. It is a complete disaster. Here the keyboards cost 460 euro. Owning one is like owning none. My company paid for my keyboard, but I already realized that I simply need another one for home use. This is absolutely magical. My fingers are far less tired and my typing speed has increased from 40 to 50wpm. Yesterday I thought to do some simple typing work on the old MS Ergo 4k, but hell, what a POS. The Kinesis has taught me to type without bottoming out. Once in that habit it is virtually impossible to type on a rubber dome anymore.
The second Kinesis for home use is on its way. Fortunately my aunt is visiting form the States and I purchased a refurbished model from the Kinesis site. I also purchased a single foot pedal. This seems like a sensible extension, since my current work is with Visual Studio. It utilizes the function keys extensively. I can then map the function keys to the left hand of the keypad map (or a different map) and access them quickly via the foot pedal. That looks like a sensible upgrade. For home use this will not be necessary and the home rolller will be sans foot pedal.
From the couple of reviews I've found online they clearly matched my findings. It is clear that the first few weeks I seriously had my doubts that this keyboard would be it. I can also see that many people fail to get used to the keyboard. The consensus in the reviews are thereby mixed. The users say "mmm. I can't recommend it to anyone, but if you deprive me of my Kinesis your life is at stake" That is exactly how I feel. It is very difficult to recommend it, because I can imagine that people will not survive the first 2 weeks. But man, this is absolutely sublime!
