Comment by closeparen
4 days ago
From what I've read, very few people who buy ortho split keyboards, even people who love and swear by them, ever recover their WPM. I could never get comfortable on my Ergodox. The Glove80 seems more promising, but I can't afford the productivity hit at work, particularly when communicating on Slack. But the Kinesis Freestyle2 with the tenting kit quickly became my daily driver & basically solved my wrist and thumb pain.
I went from “regular” keyboard to kinesis freestyle 2 to kinesis advantage 360.
The switch to the freestyle 2 was basically seamless. Switching to the advantage 360 was brutal, but I can tell you that i have not only fully recovered my typing speed but have even improved on my historical ability.
I used monkeytype.com for a couple years before the jump to the advantage 360 and still to this day, and you can see the deep trough my speed went through while i figured out the ortholinear layout and thumb clusters, and the new all time high records i’ve recently set.
I just tested. I'm 99wpm on a splitkb.com Kyria split ortho and 102wpm on the built-in keyboard of my macbook, doing a single run on each on monkeytype.com.
Switching layouts (e.g. qwerty to dvorak or colemak) takes a long time to get back to your normal speed, but ortho/columnar vs staggered in my experience is something you get used to very quickly.
But apparently there is a huge variance in how quickly folks adapt, so I may just be lucky or have enough past experience with different keyboard shapes that it happened to be easier for me.
People who are happy with their keyboard over a long period of time don't bother to test their WPM and tell other people on the internet about it. Nor do they regularly buy new keyboards and screw up their muscle memory.
I've been using some kind of split keyboard for the past 25 years, last eight on a Kinesis. My WPM on a normal keyboard is ghastly.
Not me. I have a Mistel Barocco and am still at 100WPM