Split Keyboard - After one month

I’ve now been using the split keyboard for around one month. I do not use it every day so the actual usage is less than I wished for, but I try to use it whenever I can.

Adaptation

For the first two weeks it was really hard to even hit the right letters since I was not used to having the keyboard split in the middle and without any letter printed on the keys so I kept hitting the wrong buttons. This does not happen anymore, but I’m not always completely error free either. The error rate has decreased from 70% (yeah, it was that high in the beginning) to around 10% now. Still a long way to go, but getting there.

The other big problem was that it only has 4 rows of keys and not 5 so it has modifiers to be able to type the remaining special characters, numbers and function keys. This was a whole new keyboard layout to learn. I found that a few keys were not in obvious places so¹ I re-flashed it and changed a few keys around. You can find the file with the keymap on my Github. I will also write about the flashing process in a following article.

The final setup

I’ve also found that the setup surrounding the keyboard is really important. The place that works best for me is at my work desk with the office chair. That’s because the chair has long and sturdy wristrests that can be set up to align to your wrist level vertically. You can also move each side of the keyboard on the desk to be aligned with the wristrests of the chair horizontally. I can rest my whole arm there while I’m typing and I only need to move my fingers.

At home I have a normal chair so my wrists don’t really have anything to rest on so I have to either hold them up as I type or have them on the table and move the screen away which is not practical.