I'm a couple days in with the Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard. This post is both to log the experience and to give myself a typing exercise.
If you're unfamiliar, the Advantage looks like this:
What a thing, eh? As you might guess, this is billed as an ergonomic keyboard. And unlike some of the other ergo keyboards on the market, you can find a number of people online who proclaim resolutely that the Advantage "saved their career" by resolving repetitive-stress injuries.
The Advantage has thumb clusters, which put several high-frequency keys in reach of your thumbs. The theory goes that thumbs are much stronger and more dexterous than the humble pinky, which is liable to sustain injury from overuse.
Several other keyboards offer this feature these days. The Moonlander is particularly hot one right now. The Advantage's primary differentiator is that it also has key "wells" — the letter and number keys all sit in scooped-out bowls. Per Kinesis, these key wells "reduce hand and finger extension and relax muscles." Basically, they make typing comfy!
I don't suffer from RSI, fortunately. But I do suffer from another affliction: Emacs. Emacs, also known as Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, is a modifier-happy editor. The innumerable, confounding key chords that Emacs calls upon you to invoke can tax the hands, putting you at greater risk of the dreaded "Emacs pinky" and other sorts of pain.
The Advantage not only lets you hit those modifiers with a thumb, but you can set up symmetrical arrangements of modifiers across both thumb clusters. Suppose I'm typing `C-c C-x M-w` for the `org-copy-subtree` command. Since `c`, `x`, and `w` are all on the left half of the keyboard, I can use my right hand to hit the Control and Meta keys. Spreading the modifier load across both hands sounds pretty smart to me.
I'm not in pain yet, but I'm also quite new to Emacs. Moreover, at 42 years young, my sinews aren't getting any more limber. I'd like to get ahead of any pain that's coming due. And meanwhile, a coworker had a spare Advantage2 that I could borrow for a test run.
Oh boy.
When I first sat down with it, I couldn't even type a sentence. I knew roughly where the letter keys were supposed to be, but I was constantly hitting the wrong ones. And correcting my steady string of typos was brutally effortful, as all my arrow and modifier keys were in new spots. I couldn't even backspace without staring at my keyboard and thinking about it.
Speaking of arrow keys, for whatever reason, I kept accidentally hitting the up arrow. As soon as I'd work up some speed, I'd find myself typing on the wrong line. I'm excited to have the arrow keys in that spot, though. They are first-class keys on the Advantage, no longer marooned on an island off to the side. Now that they're in reach from the home row, I can use them freely without bringing nerd-shame upon my house.
In sum, on the first day, typing went from a second-nature, near-effortless flow to feeling like I was a hapless MXC contestant. It was exhausting. I'd gone from about 100 words per minute to about 30, though adding modifiers and punctuation slowed me down a lot more. By the end of the day, I was cooked!
Day two was better! Still hard, but better. By mid-afternoon, I was back up to about 80 words per minute in a basic typing test. I had mostly adjusted to the ortholinear layout, and I was starting to enjoy the feeling of those scooped key wells. I could write complete sentences without risking a hernia.
All the non-letter keys were still tough, though — especially modifier chords. There are several key combinations that lurked deep in the bowels of my muscle memory: `Control-Alt-<key>`, `Alt-Shift-<key>`, `Command-Shift-<key>`, and so on. With thumb clusters, not only had all these keys moved, but their positioning relative to each other was completely different. While the letter keys were mostly where I expected them to be, I had to retrain from scratch on the modifiers.
Here I am at the end of day two. I can type copy pretty well again. I'm still quite slow at moving around and editing text, as well as getting around in macOS with keyboard shortcuts. But I'm making steady progress, and I'm beginning to sense the benefits of the Advantage's ergo features.
I'd wager in another week or two, I'll have this thing licked.
