Note, Oobly didn’t mention, but both the Kinesis Advantage and the Ergodox are also compromising on “normal-ish layout”.
But you might want to switch away from normal-ish layout anyway. I think learning to use a matrix or staggered-column board would take less time than you might expect.
In addition to the Kinesis Advantage, (maybe) the Maltron, and the Ergodox, it’s also maybe worth considering the “Truly Ergonomic” keyboard. It has the advantage over the Kinesis/Maltron of being smaller and more portable, and the advantage over the Ergodox of not requiring manual assembly. Also still available is the ~$100 Datadesk Smartboard, which could also be nice.
I wouldn’t recommend non-mechanical keyboards (like the various Microsoft options or the Kinesis Freestyle), but that might just be my personal bias showing through. Beyond just the feel of the keys, none of these seemed to have an especially good layout to me.
The other thing you could try to do is find one of the various out-of-production ergonomic keyboards from the 90s. The Cherry G80-5000 is a very thoughtfully designed keyboard, though it might be hard to find nowadays. There’s also the Kinesis Evolution, the Omnikey Evolution, the Chicony KB-7000 / KB-7001 (
here’s one on ebay), etc. etc. I’m not a big fan of the keyswitches used on the Apple ergonomic keyboard, but those are fairly easy to find for $30–50, used. Any of the above can be made to work with a Mac using USB via an adapter (either purchased or made yourself using a little microcontroller and some soldering; if you make one yourself you hopefully also get full programmability of the keyboard).
Or you could wait for the Matias ErgoPro or Jesse’s (Obra’s) keyboard.io kickstarter project
http://launch.keyboard.io though both of those are at least 6 months from shipping.
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I wouldn’t try to dissuade you from building something from scratch or hiring someone to do so, but be warned that that’s definitely not an immediate solution, or cheap. I’d guess it would take at least a few months of learning enough about what you want to actually get something working that you’re satisfied with, and several hundred dollars in tools/parts (unless you have an electronics workshop set up) to do the work yourself or labor to hire someone for.
Even if you do ultimately end up making something custom, I’d recommend trying out a few existing keyboards first. The nice thing is that many things you can buy either new or used (especially if you can lurk on ebay for a few weeks and watch out for deals) have good resale value and you should be able to recoup most of what you spend.
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Also, I’d question some of your goals. In particular, I don’t think there’s as much advantage in wireless, backlighting, or mac compatibility as you might think (especially in comparison to getting a physical layout that you like). Macs have a nice feature whereby you can remap modifier keys on a keyboard to suit your own tastes, making PC-targeted keyboards perfectly workable.
One thing you very well might appreciate that you haven’t listed is programmability of the keyboard. The nicest feature of the Ergodox, in my opinion, even more important than the split halves allowing arbitrary tenting, or the physical layout of the keys, is that you can make any arbitrary character mapping you want, to suit your own needs. Keyboard firmware like Hasu’s tmk_keyboard allows a lot of nifty features like dual-role keys, etc., which can be very useful.
