I never gave much thought to my keyboard in my early 20s. It just came with the computer I purchased. If one died, I would go out and buy a $20 keyboard at the store, more often than not, I just had a couple lying around. I gave no thought to how it was made, if it was comfortable, or whether I aesthetically liked it.
I started thinking about keyboards when I started writing novels. And somewhere in my late 20s, my wrists and hands started to hurt, so I began to wonder how to soften the impact of typing. I read about making sure I didn’t have arm rests digging into my forearms or elbows. The proper ergonomics for typing led to me making sure I had a keyboard tray to lower the keyboard so my arms were parallel to the floor, a decent chair, and a chair with low or no arms.
Still, wrist pain plagued me. So I purchased my first ergonomic keyboard, the Microsoft Natural Elite:
The Elite did something that surprised and confused me at first, it split the two halves of the keyboard apart. That took a couple weeks to adjust to, but the benefit of that is that it stops you from twisting your wrists:
In addition, people often ‘tent’ or raise the back of their keyboard up because it has stands there, but that’s horrible for your hands, while the Elite had stands on the front of the board by their wrist, which slopes the board away from you, which allows your fingers to ‘float’ over the keyboard in a more natural angle, with your hand hanging limp, rather than jammed upwards:
The Natural Elite, combined with a good desk chair with low arms, and a keyboard tray, helped my wrist pain a great deal. In addition, the Elite also a sort of shape to it where the TGB and YHN keys were higher than the QAZ and side keys, it rose up in the middle. That meant my hands weren’t flat, they were at a slightly more comfortable angle.
Here’s a test. Hold your wrists out in front of you in the flat, palm down position. Now rotate your hand to a 45 degree angle, now to a handshake, now slowly rotate back to palms down. What feels natural?
Look at what happens to your arm when you rotate it to face palm down:
Your arm bones literally cross over each other to create this position. Holding it for hours on end while tying induces stress, it traps nerves and blood regulation, it just isn’t good for you. By reducing how flat the keyboard is, you reduce the amount of ‘pronation’ in your arms. The Elite has a slight raise, so it offered relief.
The Elite also had very nice ‘clacky’ keys for me, so I remember that after two Elite boards, Microsoft helpfully killed it.
Thankfully they replaced it with the Microsoft Sculpt board:
It didn’t have nice clicky mechanical keys, but small chicklet keys, and for the first time, I realized I didn’t like those kinds of keys, but it was an ergonomic board.
Over time, however, the wrist pain returned, and even the MS Sculpt couldn’t keep it at bay. What to do?
I began to research other ergonomic boards. Expensive boards.
In the 1970s, in the UK, a professional typist named Lily Maltron began to take notes and do some amateur research on optimal keyboard design. She hit upon a few concepts that would, 50 years later, become adopted by online keyboard enthusiasts and cause an almost Cambrian explosion of keyboard design that we’ve seen in the last decade, but was almost the only game in town for rigorous thinking about reducing the impact of ulnar pronation and RSI impact.
Maltron’s idea was to look at ways to separate the two halves of the keyboard to allow a better angle for the arms, and to create a bowl shaped area for the keys to allow your fingers to naturally ‘dip in’ to the key well. This meant placing the keys all the same distance apart, rather than the extra movement you have to do on a flat plane. She also realized that a flat plane makes no sense because your fingers don’t end on a flat plane:
As a result, she created a bowl for the fingers, but staggered the rows, creating a modified ‘ortholinear’ style where each row of the letters is at a different depth for our different fingers. Here it is:
You can see that the keys are in up and down rows, making your fingers reach up, or down, or to the side in some cases, but not diagonally like a modern slab keyboard:
Modern keyboards are staggered because old typewriters needed the keys to be set apart so the mechanical rods that linked your key to the strike didn’t hit each other, you can see the logic of this on this old Olympia:
But there is no reason for keys to remain staggered like this in a modern keyboard, in fact, it creates a lot of issues with accuracy in modern touch typing because on a QWERTY layout, the Y key is further from the home J key than the T key is from the F key. It also makes some of the bottom row hard to feel out on a modern, staggered board.
I couldn’t afford a Maltron at the time, but I found a US company that had basically found, or imitated the same design concepts. Kinesis created a line of Maltron-like keyboards for American typists at a more affordable price point, and I was soon the owner of a Kinesis Advantage keyboard:
By the time I ordered the Kinesis, I was desperate. Typing novels meant pain. I was having to ice my hands in buckets of ice water every night and I was taking anti-inflammatories every night. Within a month, I had relief. The bowl shape was hard to get used to, but within a week or two I felt comfortable on it, and since I had already split the two halves of my keyboard with an Elite, it wasn’t too hard.
I found spreading my hands out, the bowl dipping my fingers in, and the other cool thing, the thumb clusters, really helped. In fact, putting functions on my thumbs was a huge step, because thumbs are pretty strong, and just using them for spacebar is a bit of a waste.
The $400 for a Kinesis was way less than the cost of carpal tunnel surgery that my doctor was starting to suggest I may need to look into, so it became clear it was worth the price in short order.
And then… I went down a rabbit hole.
Because, with my fingers feeling better, I started to realize that the mechanical keys on the Kinesis reminded me of how much I loved the ‘clacky’ keys on my old MS Elite, lost when I got a Sculpt, but now regained. The Kinesis came with something called “Cherry Brown” mechanical keys, and so out of curiosity, I started reading about different ‘key switches’ and ordered some samples to see what I liked. It turns out “Cherry Blue” keys that sound loud and clicky delighted me, but they didn’t come in Kinesis, even though I emailed and asked.
But reading about keys led me to the mechanical keyboard community, which eight years ago had just gotten its hands on 3d printers. Keyboard nerds were designing and making new boards with keys they liked. Some to recapture old, retro boards they liked. Some to do new things. And some to push the ergonomic designs to see if they could do better than Maltron or Kinesis.
3d printing really shifted the whole game. Whole new generations of experimentation, with the ability to print new case designs to test them, allowed a form factor to evolve that contained the orthogonal layout with depth variation so that fingers fit nicely into them, they have tenting, so that the inner column are raised up to reduce pronation, and they’re fully split so you can space them apart, and the thumb clusters sit in a natural sweep area. This is the Dactyl Manuform:
Seven or so years ago, I didn’t have the capability to hand make one of my own. It required hand-soldering the keys to a chip, so I ended up paying to have one made for me by a 3d printing enthusiast, and then eventually got a second one so I could have one at home and one at work.
Back then I had to have one custom made for me, now, people have noticed the success of the form, and now you have manufactured keyboards like the Glove80, clearly inspired by the Dactyl Manuform:
Kinesis has a fully split keyboard now, so between the Glove80 and the Kinesis Advantage, there are some good split, bowl-shaped keyboards out there now that you can buy.
A few months ago, my Dactyl’s started to get finicky, and I realized they were hand-made, and near the end of their lives. In addition, over seven years, the technology had gotten better. Instead of having to use a paperclip to bridge pins on a chip to force the keyboard to reboot and mount up so you can reprogram the keyboard (choose what the thumb keys are, or if you want a different layout, or if you want to use layers). I ordered a new Dactyl from a custom maker, unaware of the Glove80’s existence, that uses a system called Vial to program the board. It’s super easy to reprogram the board, which is neat.
But I had two keyboards dying, and while digging around, I found another development in the keyboard world.
Back in the late 90s, I learned about a keyboard called the “Datahand” keyboard. You’ve likely seen it as a prop in an SF show:
The idea behind it is that each little cluster has the ability to press down, press down southward, flick up northward, or move east or west.
Created by an ergonomic research company that went public, the keys were so light to tap, and required so little effort RSI sufferers praised it so highly it caught my eye. It saved careers. But the company went out of business in the early 00s.
But that 3d printing revolution I mentioned? Tinkerers started playing with recreating the Datahand so that they could repair it, or get its functionality back because when users who depended on the Datahand lost it they were also facing the dilemma of maybe losing their careers. So out of that came something called the “Lalboard” which allowed you to measure your hand and try to print a version of the Datahand.
From that, another tinkerer who had a Datahand die on them, looked to the Lalboard and began to iterate on the design to make it fully adjustable to any hand type or shape. That became the Svalboard:
The Svalboard uses magnets in the paddles to snap back into place. They only need 20grams of force to actuate, over the 70-90 grams of regular keyboard keys. The fact that all the paddles are just within a millimeter or so of your fingers, each item can be untightened and moved to fully adjust any part of the keyboard. The palm rest is actually only supporting your palm, not digging into your wrist and causing complications with blood flow or compressed tendons.
It’s pricey not making it yourself, but all the parts can be printed, I have copies of the STL files, and the mechanical parts are off the shelf.
I ordered one of these as my home setup, using savings. Pricey, yes, but two months ago I was starting to get, again, some pain… only in my mousing wrist. I set out to solve this by moving my editing to keyboard only, using the Glyph editing system I mocked up to use keys instead of a mouse. However, I was still having to use the mouse a ton, and when I saw that my dream keyboard since the late 90s was now once again available I noticed that the new inventor had added trackballs right into the design. I wouldn’t ever have to lift my hands off my ‘keyboard’ to mouse about.
This has radically reduced my wrist strain on my mousing hands. And the benefits after six weeks of use are that my hand is healing up really nicely.
So right now, the Kinesis, the Glove80, or the Svalboard seem to be amazing choices for ergonomic keyboards. And as expensive as the Svalboard is, it’s a *fraction* of the cost of my health insurance deductible for the Svalboard.
Six weeks ago, when I got a Svalboard delivered, I started out being able to type a mere 20-30 words per minute. As of today I’m typing in the mid to high 60 words per minute. I type at about 80-90 words per minute on my Dactyl Manuform at work. I’m imagining that in a few weeks I’ll match that speed.
I’ll shortly post more about the Svalboard, learning to use it, what it feels like, but my recommendation is: if you have wrist pain, arm pain, finger pain, carpal tunnel pain, this is way, way cheaper than surgery (which isn’t always guaranteed to solve the carpal inflammation) and it is harder to adjust to than it was to adjust to my first split keyboard, but once adjusted, this is clearly a huge level up.