Comment by cmehdy
9 hours ago
If that's any help I personally found this attitude with a company called Dygma, specifically with their Dygma Defy keyboard.
They have tons of Youtube videos answering basically every question one could have, and the keyboard is substantially larger with more keys which means less wizardry getting used to these kinds of keyboards. Example: which keyboard to buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8FeBPREzZA
I might end up buying smaller keyboards in the future if I lean more into the whole "modifier keys to do crazy stuff", but for now I'm extremely satisfied with the no-bullshit comfortable solution that the Defy offers me, and I do not care one bit about not using this or that custom firmware. It just works and works well.
Keyboards like the one in OP are definitely not for people who dont know much about split kbs, or who don't know what ortholinear and columnar and home row modifiers and QMK and ZMK mean.
If Dygma seems too corporate, too expensive, or too locked down of a firmware for you, the Glove80 and the Moonlander would probably be the best picks/search terms.
I very much appreciate the politeness and care the people who responded to my comment are bringing to their responses, but the issue isn't the keyboard layouts, it's the mindset that somehow the apparently terrible UX of the QMK and ZMK software is not just acceptable but beneficial.
I've been using programmable columnar split keyboards with modifier keys for decades, and chording keyboards before that. None of those things are at all new, nor are they particularly difficult. What seems to have been added in recent years is this weird keyboard-hipster-macho mentality that seems to have overtaken the community.
If it takes more than a PhD (which I have) and decades of experience with programmable remapable keyboards (which I also have) to use your keyboard, you're doing it wrong. If, as a professional software product engineer (which realistically most users of this type of keyboard probably are) you can't see that, you're probably way too far down a weird keyboard-hipster well and would probably do well to pull out and spend some time refreshing yourself with a reminder of how empowering good UX actually is. Bad software UX isn't actually "power user" stuff, and pretending bad software UX is an actually good thing is simply denial of how bad one's software UX apparently is.
It seems highly ironic that a community focused on keyboard productivity would fall into this particular hipster macho mindset, but for whatever reason it seems to have taken hold like wildfire. More power to you all, I guess. Definitely keep up the polite and welcoming aspects of the community, and perhaps one day some branch of the community will wake up to the fact that keyboards are a UX affordance, that the keyboard community is deeply passionate about their user experience, and that a good software UX actually matters and would in fact be a good thing and not a bad thing.