I wish I could live in Switzerland. I visited before Covid and I could not get over how beautiful their landscape is.

I’ll never get tired of these old school keyboards. The greys give me such joy

Windows 10 primarily due to work requirements. I have a laptop with Xubuntu for personal use.

I also have the Keyboardio Atreus which I love.

I learned Colemak-DH on the side, practicing a little bit every day, until I got to about 40% my QWERTY speed. I had a Ferris Sweep split keyboard that I set up next to my QWERTY keyboard at work, and started using that more regularly. I soon switched to a split Corne full time before getting the Keyboardio Atreus, both of which are configured with the Colemak-DH layout.

This recent 62 key variant of the Atreus is an experiment to see how I feel about having a row of numbers.

I can’t say that I am an expert on the science, but theoretically less finger travel might reduce repeated stress injury. I don’t know if it has been scientifically shown that Colemak helps reduce RSI in comparison to QWERTY.

From my personal experience, Colemak feels significantly more comfortable to type on. When I switch back to QWERTY, I feel like my fingers are all “spidery” in nature, stretching out and crawling all around the keyboard.

The design of the keyboards I type on in general also help improve ergonomics, but regardless if I typed on standard row staggered keyboards I’d still choose Colemak over QWERTY.

It took me about three months to reach my QWERTY speed on Colemak. I now type with Colemak full time as a software developer.

This layout is called Colemak-DH, which is a slightly optimized variant of the original Colemak layout.

It was designed to make typing more efficient for your fingers than QWERTY. If you were to analyze the top ten thousand words or so in English, you’d start to notice lots of common bi-grams and tri-grams (two and three letter combinations). Colemak looks to optimize the position of the keys such that these n-grams are typed by “rolling” your fingers from one side of the keyboard to the other. In addition, it places a lot of other common letters in intelligent positions to reduce finger travel. Over longer periods of typing, your total finger travel across the keyboard is greatly reduced in comparison to QWERTY.

In theory, you can type faster on this layout, but in my experience that’s not necessarily true (I type the same speed on Colemak vs QWERTY). But it does feel so fucking good to type on. That alone should be reason enough to consider learning it.

Those caps are gorgeous!

Heheh

As usual, the keyboard you choose will depend on your use case and personal preference of feel.

I’ve used a Ferris Sweep and a Corne. The Ferris sweep had too little keys in my opinion. I didn’t like bouncing between multiple layers to get to symbols and numbers and function keys. I found that i was getting lost in between layers often and the mental overhead was just uncomfortable to me. Some people swear by 34 keys. Just not for me.

I liked the Corne much better. The extra column meant I could bind those to common modifier keys like ctrl, alt, and super/windows, as well as have a dedicated escape, tab, and del. The extra thumbs meant I could have shift, backspace, space, and two layer keys.

As I was using the Corne more I decided that I didn’t like having two layer keys since I was accidentally pressing the incorrect layer key for what I wanted. My brain had this urge to only want to use one layer key to access symbols and numbers. I also couldn’t get a comfortable position for the arrow keys around the symbols and numbers. I had just ever so slightly too few keys.

So then I tried out this one, the Atreus. It’s similar to the Corne but features a couple more keys, which allows for more common symbols to placed on the default layer. This gave me room for arrow keys on the second layer as well as the numbers and other symbols. Now, I only need one layer key to access most of what I need for my development work.

My only issue currently with this keyboard is that, at least how I have mine currently setup, the ; key is on the bottom most row where the down arrow in the picture is. I find that my muscle memory isn’t quite there and I often hit adjacent keys when trying to hit the semicolon. But I imagine that will smooth out once I use this more. I also notice that my right wrist isn’t all that happy. It wasn’t happy before typing on a standard keyboard. This Atreus isn’t fully split so I can’t angle it exactly how I want it for ergonomics.

That being said I’ve been typing on the Atreus for about three weeks now and I can say that so far this is my favorite layout. It has just the right amount of keys for me. I’m going to experiment with another split keyboard that similar number of keys on each side, but fully split. I haven’t decided yet what that will be.

For me, it only took me about three months to get to about 70wpm on this layout.

My motivation was a bit different than just learning it for ergonomics though. I never learned how to touch type on qwerty. I use this janky peck typing style with only my index and middle fingers, with my thumb for space and pinky for shift and ctrl.

I discovered the split ergo community after a bit of a dive into the mech keyboard world. I knew that split keyboards wouldn’t work for my typing style so I needed to learn how to touch type. I figured, well, might as well learn an alternative layout at the same time.

Learning an alternative layout is mostly just for the feels. The consensus seems to be that you don’t really type faster on colemak or whatever vs qwerty. Some people do. YMMV. If you’re interested, you should just try it out and see how it feels! No harm no foul

The Atreus keyboard by Keyboardio with Susuwatari key caps made by Drop.com.

This is my current daily driver as a full time developer. I was happy with the default setup but had to switch a few things around due to using Colemak-DH layout. Some of the thumb keys had to be placed upside down due to the MT3 profile being angled too extreme for comfort with this layout. The original keyboard came with XDA profile keycaps. I’ll be returning to the original keycaps once I finish building a different split ergo keyboard.