Hi there,
Actually I just wanted to say hi. So: hi!
I've always known about the difference between mechanical and rubber dome keyboards. Since the year 2001 I've had several RSI-like issues involving wrists, arms and shoulders. At its worst, I couldn't even raise a glass of tea without pain. Fortunately, things have become much better since. But having experienced severe typing induced pain, I have very specific notions on keyboards.
In the past decade I've tried quite a few different keyboards. One of the worst was the TypeMatrix keyboard, and one of the best was the Kinesis Advantage. But as much as I like that board for typing text, I hate it for programming. Putting characters and cursor keys two rows below the home row was a bad idea, and the rubber top row keys just ruin the whole mechanical typing experience. One of the promising keyboard was the Yogitype, but it has some great design flaws that make it unsuitable for anything but typing prose. Until last week I used the Kinesis VIP, which has a layout that is much better suited for programming but comes with rather sucky keys, which get worse after a few months of intensive use.
But even though I was aware of many keyboard alternatives, only recently I discovered this forum. Thank you for participating. Last week I bought a Filco with MX blues, and I've been using it for a few days. It's not a split keyboard, but to be honest I'm not that convinced about the necessity anymore. I've done a lot of programming on my ThinkPad keyboard recently, because it has much better keys, and the laptop keyboard isn't split either. Having the tenkeyless model was absolutely necessary for me, because I do need to use a pointing device and I don't really use the numpad anyway.
I've made two tiny typing websites that perhaps you've seen before. One is
http://learn.dvorak.nl/, and as the URL implies, it's a Dvorak typing tutor. I've put a lot of thought into it, and so far almost everyone I know about that has tried it, has been able to learn the entire alphabet within 10 hours of practice, except two dyslectic users. Many even reach that level in 5 hours or even less. The other site is
http://speedtest.aoeu.nl/, which is a very simple typing test. I wanted to compare typing speeds, so I needed a good chart of scores. Of course, when I looked for that, I couldn't find any so I decided to collect some statistics myself. It's been used almost half a million times, so by now the resulting histogram chart is rather stable and reliable. The median has dropped a little since some sites aimed at retards started referring to the test, though. (In case you're wondering, I'm talking about sites seeking people to solve captchas.)
The primary problem with all keybords is that they solve exactly one problem, sometimes two, but none of them is a good combination of those. Split keyboards solve the awkward wrist angle. Mechanical keyboards solve key action. Dvorak fixes the layout, but nothing else. The Advantage is great by solving three problems at once (wrist angle, contour, and good switches) but has the key fields at a fixed distance and introduces new problems with its rubber top row and awkward bottom row. But why isn't there any keyboard that uses great switches, a split and contoured design with freely positionable halves, AND a great layout?
