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Comment by replwoacause

4 days ago

This looks awesome but I think I’m paralyzed by all of the possibilities. My Kinesis Advantage 2 has served me well for years. I wonder if anyone has switched from one to a custom board?

4 comments

replwoacause

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danieldk  4 days ago

I switched from a Kinesis Advantage 2 to a Glove80 over 1.5 years ago (not custom, I know) and I love it.

I also made some Dactyl Manuforms, but their key wells are not as nice as the Advantage, let alone the Glove80. They also have pretty bad thumb clusters (though with Cosmos it's configurable), not a good palm rest, etc. The only custom board I would be interested in (if the Glove didn't happen) would be:

https://github.com/wizarddata/Ergo-S-1

Since it also seems to have good palm rests, etc.

eawgewag  4 days ago

I've done the switch! My 2c:

If the Kinesis is working for you, I would not switch. It's an extremely high quality board and most of these Dactyl's are all attempts to replicate the Kinesis at a more accessible price point and/or with higher amounts of customizability. The tradeoff is that they tend to be extremely fragile, have really poor build quality, and have zero to none customer support attached.

However, the KA doesn't work for everybody. I find it too big and the switches too heavy. So I opted for a custom approach, which sadly only survived about 4 months.

dbalatero  3 days ago

I switched to a Cyboard Imprint, and had them print me a 6x6 Kinesis-style layout. They had me take hand photos and tweaked the print to my hand.

My reasons to switch were:

- better thumb cluster (more buttons reachable)

- split keyboard (better ergo placement)

- slightly optimized key placement (nice to have)

- QMK firmware (good for a laugh, fun to hack, can program hyper/super keys into firmware)