I'm the author of the submitted site (although "remixer+maintainer" is more accurate – there was an older list [1] which I updated and converted to a gallery with filters). I'm not the author of the Goldtouch review [2] which I (indirectly) link to.

A search for "best ergonomic keyboard" or similar returns articles from the New York Times, Forbes, etc [3]. These usually cover mass-produced rubber-dome ergonomic keyboards – the Microsoft Sculpt, Goldtouch, and so on. I didn't feel any need to duplicate this, though I will reconsider.

This site shows mechanical split keyboards. Some of these are under the "mass produced" filter: the Kinesis and Ergodox etc. The intention is to show options your IT department should be willing to buy. It's not in any way intended to demean these products!

[1] https://github.com/diimdeep/awesome-split-keyboards

[2] http://xahlee.info/kbd/goldtouch_adjustable_keyboard.html

[3a] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2020/07...

[3b] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/comfortable-ergo-...

I think the Kenesis Freestyle (all variants) does tent? It's just an optional add-on, not part of the base kit.

And I assumed having the mass-market ones grouped was mostly intended to let you filter the other ones out (assuming you're trying to buy one, and not just read about wacky historical curiousities). At least how I used it when recently exploring this market (in the end I decided to stick with my Kinesis Advantage, though I did buy some new keys and o-rings to reduce noise slightly)

edit: after looking for the Goldtouch review, I now understand what you mean. It's grouped under the the list of standard options that he has reviews for, not called out on it's own. But if it is basically just an inferior version of anothere near identical product, then I guess that's fair enough.

I'll add a dissenting voice. The only thing good about the goldtouch is the tenting. Which is brilliant, I'll concede. You can make it both tented, but also flat and split for a change.

But the goldtouch involves So. Much. Chording. I have the v1, which makes it worse. The windows key is way the fuck to the left, making constant stretches necessary. Plus the fact that the thumb keys can only press space is a major ergonomic negative. It's also a membrane keyboard, meaning bottoming out all the time is required.

It's a decent keyboard, and I'm glad it works well for you, but it isn't really god's gift to humanity either.

The only truth about ergonomics is that everyone needs different things.

I used a goldtouch for years to manage some early RSI symptoms. In the beginning it helped a lot, but later my symptoms changed a bit and it stopped helping. Elevating my wrists to reach the tenting position was causing more problems then the keyboard was helping. I switched over to a Kinesis and it has helped me tremendously.

It probably still works for some people! I know we have some Microsoft ergonomic keyboard fans on this site, so maybe the author shouldn't poo-poo so many of these.

I really persevered with a kinesis but the thumb keys were awkward regardless of the posture of my hands and wrists.

I really liked the arrow key placement though. They are badly placed on mainstream keyboards for touch typists.

I'm currently migrating from the Kinesis Advantage to the Advantage 2.

The old Advantage has served me well, but it's USB implementation seems to interact really badly with some modern laptops.

Do you think a keyboard like that is mainly helpful for people with pain, or it would make typing more comfortable/efficient for the general user ?

The idea isn't entirely new. The TGR Alice is a popular board that has two b keys [0].

The more straightforward approach to get a full extra column would be to just grab a keyboard that already has 7+ columns per side (ie the chimera[1]) and repurpose those to be duplicate keys.

[0] https://i.redd.it/9kyeyht1eqy11.jpg

[1] https://github.com/GlenPickle/Chimera

I have made for myself something alike:

https://imgur.com/a/By9YN2q

Is made on wood, to being on the style of MS Ergo but not curved (yet I think it feel nice as is).

I used to hit some keys with the 'wrong finger' before. But it hasn't prevented me from adopting to the Kinesis Advantage.

For Nethack and games in general, I have a cheap 'normal' keyboard.

.. or you could just switch and fix your bad behaviors.

I would say that as a daily Advantage user for right about 20 years, it's not a keyboard to play games with and it's not a keyboard to use for a very heavy kb+mouse software situation (like cad or photoshop). In those situations you often keep your dominant hand on your mouse at all times and your non-dominant glued to the keyboard. For those situations I have a fairly standard 65% board on my desk. But for coding, emails, etc. That all happens on the advantage.

A friend of mine cut up her Kinesis Advantage to put a big trackball right in the middle. (There's enough space in the housing, especially if you are not afraid to cut and move the circuit board.)

A similar position might work for you?

I use a standing desk to be in a similar (but upright) position, because sitting is also bad for me.

From browsing r/ErgoMechKeyboards and GeekHack, I think the main group of people making these custom keyboards are devs actually. Consider how foot pedals are a long-standing emacs thing :)

I use a 40% layout on a custom board with palm keys for coding and writing in LaTeX mainly (like the Model 01 with 3x6 alphas 3 thumbs 1 palm on each side). It took some effort to re-train, but I'll never go back to a keyboard without palm keys now, I love the setup. They palm keys are perfect for activating the layers for arrows/navigation or numpad. But typing style plays a role too, it's definitely probably not everyone!

I code full time on an Iris. Hold/tap is huge for me for every kind of bracket or brace, just like the spacecadet keyboard that came before us. I have my layer modifiers under F, D, and S which then flip the right hand to Vim style arrows, a number pad, and a symbol pad.

Space cadet hold/tap shifts details here, from a soft remap I used to use: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s17...

I use my Ergodox full-time and I love it, but I feel this way about an Atreus I just picked up: there are only a few keys, and some are inaccessible (!) so I'm stuck putting stuff like colons and quotation marks in a layer. Feels bad.

Agreed! I tried all kinds of keyboards, and intensely dislike all these smaller ones, which I find absolutely unusable for anything more complex than typing email. Some people quite visibly disagree with me

I eventually settled on a kinesis ergo edge, which I really like.

I've also been enjoying the Moonlander. I was hesitant about the layout, but spilling liquid on my Kinesis Edge and damaging one of the switches forced my hand. The first few weeks were slow going (I dropped from 140wpm to 50-60), but I adapted fast enough. I haven't measured in a while, but I feel like I'm fully back to speed.

I love the customizability - I started with a layout that was influenced by 3 or 4 other programming layouts I found but have made a dozen or so minor tweaks to it over the last few months into something I (mostly) love.

For coding, it's fantastic and I have no complaints (once I found a system for getting to the bracket keys that work for me, at least). For gaming, however, the tap/hold pairing just doesn't work for me. I had Alt and Esc bound to the same key and could not reliably Alt+Tab or hit Esc in a game for the life of me. I split those out earlier this week and now Esc is better, but Alt is still combined with PgDn which is problematic.....I'm probably going to give up and make it a dedicated Alt key and move PgUp/PgDn to another layer.

I have larger hands, so I wonder if I should have just got the Ergodox and had more thumb keys, but now that I'm used to the Moonlander I have no intention of switching.

I'm new to mechanical and split keyboards, but so far the moonlander has been great. Well, in the beginning it was a bit of a learning curve, but coming from the ergodox that shouldn't be an issue for you. Not being wireless is the only complaint that I have.

I switched to a Moonlander from an Ergodox and am liking it. I ended up not liking their built-in tenting mechanism, so 3D printed my own shims that screw to the back, allowing me to tent the keyboard but also tilt the "wings" upwards. Very comfortable!

One thing I thought I hated about the Ergodox was how inaccessible the small keys on the thumb cluster were, and I thought I would like 3 big keys better. It turns out not to be the case... those keys are useless, but there are a lot of useless keys that are nice to have around (arrows, delete/insert, home/end, pgup/pgdn). I mostly do everything in Emacs and so don't use those keys, but when I'm using non-Emacs software, I do miss them.

(I ultimately decided on Backspace, Alt, Up; Space, Enter, Down as what I use the big thumb keys for. Not sure I love this. This transitioned my backspace key from my right pointer finger to my left thumb, and it broke my muscle memory. I still forget that you can control backspace words to kill them outside of Emacs (where I use C-w for that, which closes your window in every other program).)

TL;DR: it's fine! But still not perfect.

I very much enjoy my Moonlander. This is my first split keyboard so I have limited reference points, but the layout still seems quite sensible overall. There's a few things I wish were slightly different, though:

The lowermost of the three thumb keys and the red keys are a bit of a stretch to reach and I already have rather large hands.

The two keys on the bottom row closest to the center are quite comfortable to reach with my thumbs and I use them for extra modifiers. I hardly use the other keys on that row.

I prefer not to use the number row, I have mapped a numpad to another layer instead.

I picked up a Kinesis Advantage2 this year and so far I am very happy with it. Now I can type much longer without any wrist pain. I'm still struggling to reprogram my brain for some keys, but part of that is due to years of bad habits that I'm trying to undo. It was hard to get used to at first but I really like the layout of the thumb clusters.