Hi all,

I’ve been typing on the first keyboard I ever bought for about 7 years now (Sharkoon Skiller Pro +) and, after trying out some of the shiny mechanical keyboards my friends bought over the years (Roccat Vulkan Pro, Steelseries Apex Pro, etc), decided I wanted a new keyboard as well.

I’ve done a little research on keyboards as a whole and have a few favorites, but recently I came across ergonomic keyboards, such as shown in this community. Now, I’m unsure wether I want to go with a traditional board (my top candidate is the Meletix Zoom98 with Morandi Switches) or try something completely different.

I’m looking for stories and advice right now, to get the most out of the money i’m willing to spend on a keyboard (buying multiple is not an option at the price point of for example the Zoom98).

Looking forward to this :)

  • VOwOxel@discuss.tchncs.deOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Another thing: I use Blender. Is it possible / feasible to reduce key count that much when blender has this huge amount of keyboard shortcuts? I think if I were to buy an ergo keyboard, I'd gravitate towards the moonlander for this reason.

    • cerement@slrpnk.net
      2·
      1 year ago
      • similar to using a phone keyboard, everything goes in layers – once you get into the 30% or “small” range, more effort is put into “optimizing” your layout than even into designing the ideal physical layout – you have Ben Vallack doing production work on an 18-key split and people coding on steno keyboards
      • but since everything is on layers, you can dedicate an additional layer to something like just Blender shortcuts (and one to just Photoshop shortcuts and one to just Python coding and so on)
      • this is not a fast journey and I would not recommend jumping into the deep immediately with a Hummingbird – start with something like a Moonlander and slowly acclimate yourself to removing keys and offloading things onto layers, customizing those layers to your needs
        • as an aside, a lot of people who go down the rabbit hole also use the chance to move away from QWERTY as well, with Colemak-DH being a popular alternative – the context switching between learning Colemak on columnar and keeping QWERTY on row-stagger often is enough to not mess up muscle memory