In an effort to upgrade my desk and lessen the mysterious strain in my right wrist, I’ve been trying a bunch of different mice and keyboards lately. I’ll go over the mouse situation elsewhere.
Search around, and there is lots of passionate discussion about PC keyboards. Some people argue for the split ergo thing, some for the classic IBM thing, some for the minimalist thing, etc. I’ve tried several, although I’ve never gone the full distance with anything quite so radical as the “Bat“.
I started with: old Compaq IBM-clone full 101-key PC keyboard. This thing has great key action and a good layout, but it’s very loud, and I think the long key travel was causing me some wrist strain.
Then I tried a Microsoft “Comfort” keyboard – too squishy.
Very briefly, a Logitech Cordless Desktop – a keyboard that looked like the flight deck on the Enterprise. Too complicated, and too finicky.
Typematrix 2030. Awesome feel and very sleek looks. My girlfriend said “that keyboard looks cool.” Although I agree with their rhetoric on the straight grid layout, but in practice it’s difficult to get used to, and the lack of arrow and Home/End keys in the usual layout is really problematic for even an occiasional programmer, like me. A secondary problem caused by the non-standard layout is that it’s very difficult to switch back and forth between other computers – and since I use at least three regularly, this was sort of a deal-breaker for me.
After coming across the latest piece from Coding Horror, I decided to try yet another – the Mac Keyboard.
The Mac Keyboard combines some of the nice features of the TypeMartrix — clean looks, nice tactile feel with low key travel — with a real arrow key and normal key layout, including standard arrow keys and Home/End cluster. A quick Google of ”mac keyboard” windows led me to the conclusion that I might want to remap the Command (Windows) and Option (Alt) keys. After trying it myself with KeyTweak and getting stuck with strange Alt-Tab behavior, I found this article which provides a Mac keyboard mapping for KeyTweak script that you can download and load directly in KT. This did the trick nicely.
Now that I’ve used it for a day or two, I have to say that the Mac Keyboard is pretty awesome. While I agree with the idea of minimizing distance to the mouse for ergonomic reasons, which is why the TypeMatrix omits the numeric keypad and normal arrow cluster, in the end I agree with Jeff Atwood that “thou shall not mangle the Home Key Cluster”, and that “a quality keyboard is one of the best (and cheapest) investments you can make in your career” — not only for a programmer (which I’m not), but for anyone who spends a lot of time at the computer.
Update: after using the Mac Keyboard for another week or so, the only other missing thing is the Ins key. While I can understand that Mac OS is designed to work without Ins, it’s useful for copy & paste in Unix shell sessions. This article seems to indicate that the Fn key on the Mac Keyboard is mapped to Ins in Windows, but that doesn’t seem to be working. I’m going to try remapping F15 or something else to see if that works.
A great compromise would be a Mac Keyboard without the numeric keypad:
