My Favorite Keyboards

Interestingly, the speaker part and the keyboard part are completely separate. The "cable" consists of four separate cables (keyboard, power, line out, mic in) in a thin sleeve. Mine was supplied with AT plug on the keyboard cable and Y-adapter that converted PS2 into AT DIN and barell jack for the speaker power. The keyboard label indeed says it is powered by 9V DC, but I guess that never really happened as PS/2 is 5V no matter what various devices say.

Edit: And as for the supper hard to find nowadays part: I suspect that part of the reason is that the keyboard module inside the thing is ridiculously sensitive to even minor spills.

It's good enough for typing for long sessions and reliable enough to type on without much thinking.

It has great features though. Automatic backlight and standby via hall & ambient light sensors, great key texture and weight, scissor switches instead of bog-standard membrane, etc.

It's not a mechanical keyboard and not smooth as one, but it's not an enemy of fingers and hands.

Logitech's bolt receiver is great though. Encrypted, low latency and has native Linux support via Solaar.

I have 3 mechanical keyboards, but one is too big, others are not in my native layout and miss a couple of keys which I need for certain characters, so they are delegated to long coding sessions at home.

- nearly made me cry.

- solved my back pain.

When you didn't learn to type properly, relearning to type can be a very difficult task; re-learning on a split keyboard is particularly unforgiving. Around three weeks into re-learning I was convinced I would never learn properly and that I'd wasted a lot of time and money (I was freelancing at the time) on something that wouldn't help me eat, never mind sleep.

Two weeks later I was back up to normal typing speeds, a month after that I was faster than ever. Two months or so after that, my back pain was gone.

Of course, my back pain was caused by sitting lopsided - something an overdominant hand on a standard keyboard pushes you towards. No amount of exercise and posture correction was solving it - but when the true cause was resolved it cleared up (with exercise) very quickly.

I'd buy this keyboard again in a heartbeat.

Oh you mean… OK. The one on my 2008 unibody MacBook, which I likely put the most hours in on of any of them. Then the one on my ancient and lovely Thinkpad T240 — one of the most pragmatically delightful computers ever — and probably the N33SX I owned in 1992.

The keyboard on the M1 Max MBP is quite nice, too.

Less keys (3x6) and lower profile is even nicer for ergonomics, for me at least, but does require a bit more of mental gymnastics for layers. well worth it IMHO.

I used a friend's ErgoDox a few years ago, and quite liked it, but what holds me back is the Topre switches. If only it was feasible to acquire individual Topre switches and put them onto a custom PCB...

Here's hoping someone on HN will swoop in and tell me "It's totally possible! Just _____!"

I cannot fathom all my collegues who still use non ergo keyboards and mice...

I should get an alternative to my old compact / flat apple keyboard one day though. It's been going strong for nearly a decade.

But in the end the housing being out of plastic, it creaked, wobbled and just was not satisfying to type on.

I came from premium mechnical keyboards with solid steel or aluminum construction.

I ended up with the Neo Ergo, a middle ground. Not as ergonomic, but solid feel, no plastic and great looks too.

Going to such a different form factor feels enough like relearning to type that I found it also to be a good time to learn a better layout than qwerty.

I use my own layout called hubris:

https://github.com/jpease/hubris

Edit: on second thought, I guess some people might not like the low switches?

Switching to orto without solving a real bottleneck is like changing Opel to Porshe but keep using a set of square wheels. Of course the car will run better, but...