I got a kinesis advantage2 around 2021. Many before that I used various ergomic keyboards: microsoft curve, microsoft natural keyboard 4000 and a cherry ergo.

The natural keyboard had an integrated rest for the wrist, and in general was a comfortable experience. But for software development they all have some limitations.

The first limitation is the layout itself. The non alphabetic characters ([]{}<>,.) are all over the place, far from the home row and require the right hand to shift constantly.

The second limitation is the build. Membrane keyboards don’t last very long, and they become stiff over time.

kinesis advantage v2

After trying the alice layout that the natural and cherry keyboard had, I decided to go one step further and have a split keyboard.

The kinesis advantage v2 was a relatively easy choice. Already preconfigured, no need for extra software, mechanical. But expensive, more so as an import from the US.

I think the general shape worked great for the hands. The rest was in the right place and the fingers were naturally in a curved position below the wrist line.

It was programmable directly through the keyboard using a special button for swaps and another one for macros.

But for a heavy vim and shell user like me, there were some problems. The keys had a lot of travel and were a bit too hard (I believe it had brown switches). The right thumb cluster was a bit too far and too overused because of enter and whitespace.

I believe that the intented way to use the keyboard is to lift the hands during the presses, but probably I got used to keep the wrist resting and stretch the thumb.

Eventually it got quite bad for my right thumb, so I had to replace the keyboard entirely.

corne

Around 2024 I had a choice between going back to something like the natural keyboard, stick with my cherry keyboard or get something new.

Back then I thought that a smaller keyboard with the thumb cluster much closer to the rest of the keys would work for me.

When I got it, I thought of it as a downgrade compared to the kinesis. It is flat, there is no wrist rest and it is a bit too high despite the choc switches. But the pain disappeared and I could continue working with it.

However there is clearly no single optimal way to use a corne keyboard, so over the last 2 years I have been trying to get to a decent layout.

Initially I tried with the home row approach. It did not work for me because I tend to leave the keys pressed when typing the adjacent key. For example, when typing “aspirine”, do you release “a” before pressing “s”?

It took me to a rabit hole of trying to get the timing right, which is impossible to solve as the keyboard cannot predict if is a mod press or a literal press in a reliable way.

Chords worked much better for me. When I want to press enter I press “jk” at the same time. Some less frequent operations are in other layers, or behind the “lead” key for sequences.

QMK is better than the advantage v2 software. I also suspect that the browser usb interface that the voyager uses is not as powerful. QMK allows to change what the tiny screen in the keyboard does, change any waiting time, lights, etc.

However corne needs a bit of external help not to cause pain: I use a book to tent it a bit, and I use two ergo rests as using a regular wrist rest doesn’t quite work with a split weirdly shaped keyboard.

I suspect that the optimal keyboard for me is actually an alice layout with the shape of the modern logitech ergo that is programable with QMK, but for now the corne works great.