(This page from my old site seems to get a lot of incoming traffic so I’ve brought it back to life, however I’ve changed the permalink structure when I moved servers and I doubt anyone following the link will bother to find it. I installed a permalink redirector so it lives again! )
So Bill Clementson has purchased a Kinesis keyboard. I’ve been using a kinesis since around the Summer of 2000 for very similar reasons. Due to a lot of text based gaming with bad key layouts in the 90′s I was in constant pain on the outside of my hands.
I own a Kinesis Pro PS/2 and I now have a second Advantage Pro USB for work.
The keyboard does take a bit of time to get used to, simply because the keys are straight up and down so you’ll tend to hit a key to the side of the one you actually intended. I was back to full speed in a couple of weeks, it probably would have taken less time but I was in the middle of a big project when it first arrived and due to time constraints I kept switching to my old keyboard to get work done at my regular pace. Now that I’m used to it I’d say I easily type faster than with my old keyboard and with much less effort as the action of the keyboard is excellent.
I’ve done the standard key switching in that I swapped esc and caps lock. I also run it with the ctr/alt keys at the top of both thumb sections as I found the windows/mac key not particularly useful. I’m tempted to try the tab swap that one of Bill’s linked pages suggested although that will take some time to get used to. I will note that if you have one of these at work you can expect to get a lot of attention and a good deal of ribbing. Expecially if you decide to use the gas pedals.
I’m always suprised that programmers will spend money everywhere except the piece of the device they use most to interact with it. Most programmers probably spent more on their mouse than they did on their keyboard.
If there’s one negative about the device its that if you are used to playing first person shooter games and you use the standard asdw movement layout it will take some time to get used to it. I’d actually recommend getting a dedicated flat tablet keypad for games as even after a few years I don’t think I’m as good with my Kinesis as I was with a traditional keyboard. It could be because I never tried an alternate layout like learning to use a row for forward/back/left/right instead of multiple rows. If you’re in Canada you can purchase items from Ergo Canada who I’ve bought both my keyboards from and have been very pleased with the service.