Allen Day’s Weblog

I bought a couple of Kinesis Advantage™ Pro USB for PC & Mac ergonomic keyboards about 3 years ago. A friend recommended it for reducing wrist and forearm pain from spending many hours typing.

Overall it’s a good product, and it is definitely the best keyboard I’ve used. The main advantage is that it reduces fatigue. Some of the fatigue reduction is due to the QWERTY key layout — the keys are vertically aligned instead of staggered, and the concave contour lets your hands sit in a more relaxed position.

However, the major advantage of this keyboard over others is the thumb keys. Think about it — your thumbs are very strong digits, certainly much stronger than your pinkies. Why should they only be used to hit the space bar, or occasionally curled under to hit CTRL and ALT?

I set up my keyboard to leverage the thumb keys as much as possible using the built-in remapping feature of the Kinesis Advantage. Side by side below are the default layout and my modified layout.

The default layout seems to be well-suited for transcription. For programming… not so good. Especially if you use Emacs as your editor (as I used to) or Fluxbox as your window manager (as I do), because these two rely heavily on the ALT key for keychain commands.

I remapped the up/down arrows to be more like vim. I put CAPS LOCK as far away as possible to prevent hitting it, and put CTRL there instead — like the Sun layout. I’m not using a Windows machine at all, so I opted to not map the Windows key.

This is a great layout.

Downsides of the keyboard:

Crappy, crappy firmware. The keyboard frequently does not detect key-up events, so I frequently find the keys get stuck and a character will get inserted a bunch of times. The shift keys seem to be most prone to getting stuck, especially if you type A BUNCH OF CAPS IN A ROW WITHOUT LETTING OFF THE SHIFT KEY IN BETWEEN THEM. The fix for this is to hit both shift keys a bunch of times to get them to register the key-up event. Very annoying. There have been times when keys getting stuck have actually caused me to lose work in my editor (think about having the shift key stuck in vim command-mode). Ugh. Granted, this does seem to happen more on the keyboard in my home office than in my office at school. Maybe it’s the cat hair?

Function keys suck too. Frequently a single press to a function key registers as two key presses.