danieldk

The next obligatory step, assuming you need (or want for whatever reason) an ergo keyboard, is a visit here: https://jhelvy.shinyapps.io/splitkbcompare/

It's nice for flat keyboards, but not really useful for contoured keyboards like the Kinesis Advantage, Glove80 or Dactyl. I am still hoping that someone will provide a service where you can offer stub versions of common contoured keyboards so that you can try how they'd feel. Of course, the 3D construction if one of the more expensive parts, so I don't know how feasible it is...

I’d only consider the Moonlander if you have large hands. I have very average male hands and the Moonlander thumb cluster was quite painful. It’s far away and the keys are angled weirdly. Other good prebuilt options, from close to a regular keyboard to ticks off all ergo features:

• Kinesis Freestyle Edge RGB
• Dygma Raise
• Keyboardio Model 100
• Kinesis Advantage
• MoErgo Glove80

My experience is that once you go ergo, you’ll end up wanting all features, so you’ll save yourself a lot of money by immediately buying a Kinesis Advantage or Glove80.

I don’t find that surprising, the Moonlander only had very small pinky column stagger, so the upper pinky key is hard to reach (Q in QWERTY). You either need more aggressive stagger or a contoured keyboard with a raised pinky column.

💯In addition to an adjustable chair, also get a height adjustable desk. And not one of these desks where you have to unscrew the legs. They are too much effort and you’ll never finetune it in the end. Get an electric height adjustable desk. It makes finetuning so much easier for getting the right wrist angle and it also allows you to use it as a standing desk.

These are separate things. You can easily replace the SmartSet controller in the KA2 with a KinT controller with QMK. The key wells and thumb clusters are connected to the controller with removable ribbon cables. The swap-out takes maybe 5 minutes.

Kinesis offered replacement flex PCB and key wells in the past, so that you could replace your switches. They don’t sell them anymore and instead you have to go through an expensive UpgradeKeyboards.com build.

It’s pretty easy to replace the controller in the Advantage2 with a KinT and then you have QMK as well. My three Advantages all have QMK.

They have them in Dvorak (QD). But presumably, most Advantage users are touch typists and the Advantage is programmable, so there is no real need? I use mine with blank PBT caps.

I have tried to overload the home row keys as modifiers but that is a huge mistake as it causes misfires or takes TOO LONG to aviate, there is no middle ground with that one.

Did you try bilateral combinations? They reduced accidental misfires to almost zero for me:

https://getreuer.info/posts/keyboards/achordion/index.html

The Kinesis Advantage2 (and earlier Kinesis Advantage/Contoured models) have 20 degree tenting built-in. Also the usual ergo features (column stagger, thumb keys) and key wells.

Wow, there are more people and posts here than I expected. I hope that that this community gains enough momentum to stand on its own outside Reddit.