If you haven't experienced RSI to the point where you understand that reaching for distant keys is literally painful, then I can see how you might come to the conclusion that it's just for e-peen points.
Yes about 20 years ago, I switched to a kinesis advantage (then called the essential) it solved all my problems and I still have a relatively normal amount of keys.
Lots of the fancy keyboards coming out at the moment are settling around the layout the advantage has had for decades (although usually without the nice curve the advantage has).
yeah no the whole ergo-dox moonlander blahblah family is just 'advantage but way easier to build cause it's flat'... and they all suck because they are flat.
I tried out a friends glove80... it's just kinesis but still worse, there are a few things that kinesis does. It's better than the ergo-dox because keywells.. it's better than the glove 80 because of the keycap profiling. I do think the profiling on the 360 is a little worse than the older advantage 1/2 but it's pretty good. .. but like the glove 80 all the keycaps are the same height from the switch and it's not great.
(to give props advantage basically stole from maltron but the build quality on those is so so shitty.. vacuform cases sometimes)
It is fun, you learn something in process, nothing wrong with that. E.g. knowledge I have acquired while playing with keyboards was beneficial while fixing some home appliances and toys. I don’t have any health problems like RSI and find it more comfortable. And BTW there is end game - you can create one key Morse keyboard that is actually usable https://blog.ffff.lt/posts/morsilka/
I've built half a dozen keyboards I've build handwired, bought pcbs off the shelf and designed my own pcb for a custom 'keyboard' for a space flight simulator so that i could more easily use it under vr. It's fun and all, but chasing the how few keys do i need genie is a waste of time.
> The whole 'least keys possible i'm 31337 hax0r' optimization fuckery I just find hilarious.
On most typical keyboards, your thumbs only get to press one huge spacebar. (Which means for keys like shift, enter, backspace, the hands need to move, or the pinkies need to stretch).
Whereas, most of these "31337 hax0r" keyboards allow each thumb to use two or three keys each. With that, the thumbs can then use backspace/enter/etc. without the fingers having to stretch, or hands having to move.
i use one of those keyboards but one with a sane number of buttons (kinesis advantage) I have access to 12 thumb keys. Modifiers, space, backspace, delete, enter being the primary ones I use, but also pagup, pagedown, home, end.
Putting very commonly used charters on a modifier and probably two modifiers (layer+shift is common to get to a third layer) for keyboards with ~40 or under keys is connotative overhead for quite a while no matter how you cut it.
> Putting very commonly used characters on a modifier and probably two modifiers (layer+shift is common to get to a third layer) for keyboards with ~40 or under keys is connotative overhead for quite a while no matter how you cut it.
Sure, but it's a different cost, rather than an additional cost.
Any key that's not within reach of your hands at rest on home row, your hands will either need to move, or your fingers will need to stretch to reach them.
The sub-40-key keyboards trade-off the cost of a more sophisticated keymap, for the benefit of bringing the full functionality of the keyboard within reach of the hands.
well good luck with your optimal 10 key keyboard so that you never have to move your fingers. Or one of those crazy datahand style boards where there are four buttons surrounding your fingertip.
The whole 'least keys possible i'm 31337 hax0r' optimization fuckery I just find hilarious.