TL;DR The start of the journey with the kinesis advantage

Update 2024 : This keyboard has been in it’s box for a few years now, stuck on top of a cupboard. What happened? I starting building split keyboards just for fun. What I found was that keyboard like the void-ergo and a few others were fun to build. I swapped over to a 40% void ergo and just stuck with it. The kinessis is a good ergo keyboard, but it’s big. At the time there were no other options like it. I went back and had another play with it, and it’s good, but too big really.

One keyboard to rule them all?

Ok I’ve got one, yep the keyboard to end all keyboard. After almost 25 years as a software engineer, I took the big step and bought this beast of a keyboard. But only after I found it on sale, and refurbished at amazon for £258.00 or there abouts.

The first few weeks

Oh I was slow and not so good, I started using type monkey to get some practice in and did not use the keyboard as my main driver for a least a week. Even then I was all over the place.

Problems

The problem was not the general keys, hey I could get up to 80 wpm on this thing, (Which for me is pretty good). Nope the issue was them dam thumb keys. Space is ok, you hit that with you thumb but backspace. I mean come on, my brain has been hard wired to hit that backspace in the same place for 20 years.

Fix for vim users

Cursor keys

If you use vim them you will get very confused by the cursor keys, they are the wrong way around. Ok the arrows point the right way, but when you use vim “J” is down, and if you move to the cursor keys, well that finger goes straight on top of the down key. Oh that drove me nut, so I swapped them over.

Fix your brackets []

These things are really hard to reach on the keyboard. Is there a solution. I mean they are no-where near

Any thoughts? How about all bracket from the same source.

shift () cmd {} alt []

We have modifier keys, like shift, cmd and alt, can those be used?

Hold and Tap and the Caps Lock

So I also discovered that there is a hold and tap mode, but what can I use it for.

Well then when you hit the escape key, it’s always a quick tap yep?

But what if I told you we could set it up so that if you hold it down, it becomes left ctrl .

Now that is really usefull.

But it’s not perfect you have to set the delay just right

The keys - lctrl rctrl

Are these thing different?