Hi guys, long time reader but now commenting since I finally read enough to pull the trigger on a couple of keyboards.
Now, have a TECK at work and actually love it. It's a good compromise between radical approach and ergonomics. I find it really comfortable to type on and it has solved some of my RSI problems.
At home, I am currently trialling an ErgoDox (EZ). The excessive distance of the thumb keys very quickly became apparent, with my thumb naturally resting in the gap between the main cluster and the thumb cluster.
Currently, I am making do with using the two bottom inner keys from the main cluster as space bars - whilst this works, my hands feel cramped rather than stretched this way, the target area is too small, and my arms are still getting fatigued all too quickly from having to be so precise...
With all the discussion (for years) about various proposed revisions to the thumb cluster, I cannot for the life of me see the (to me) most obvious solution of working with the existing design by creating a single keycap that spans from the current Right/Up buttons (on the default ErgoDox EZ layout, Advantage style) to the outermost thumb button. Then map only one of the down presses (whichever is hit most cleanly and consistently by a thumb down in between them) to Space, and just deaden the other one...is this impractical? The only potential blocker I see is the need to cut out the little 'peninsula' in between these two keys....but this does not really concern me if it means I can use this keyboard without discomfort!
With the multi-layer design of the board, I have way more keys than I need (arrow keys fall under my home row on another layer) so losing one key is a very insubstantial tradeoff for the net gain of being able to more easily use the most frequently pressed key!
If this already exists...then I'd totally expect it to, and please point me in the right direction!
Thanks!