Now that KeymapKit is feature complete, I can (finally!) publish the keymap I’m actually using today. (Update: I actually had to push this back two days after briefly publishing it on Thursday and discovering a dark mode regression, right before leaving for a short family road trip. Now the “finally” comes with a little more finality.)
The important parts haven’t changed much from my early ErgoDox keymap. Moving just seven keys — escape, tab, shift, backspace, return, and two control keys — made a huge difference in pain. Take the guided tour in the keyboard above to see exactly what I did, or just click around to see what all my keys do.
Since that first keymap, I’ve moved to an Advantage360. The primary reason for this is more portability. The ErgoDox-EZ I have does best if it’s in one place all the time. Moving it is no big deal unless you’re doing it a lot, which requires packing it up, unpacking it, and re-adjusting its tenting legs every time. The Advantage360 Pro is Bluetooth and sits at a perfect tent by default, which means setting it up at a temporary desk at work is a lot easier. (It’s still a lot less convenient than just using a laptop keyboard; if I could use one of those without any pain, I would.)
I did engage in a flirtation with the ZSA Voyager, which is really lovely to type on and much smaller to pack up, but it wasn’t as easy to set up as the Advantage360 and I sorely missed the thumb and inner finger keys that the ErgoDox and Advantage360 have. Maybe sometime I’ll blog about the different layouts I tried.
This Advantage360 layout was fun to make because it exercised all the new features of KeymapKit, like user-definable keyboards, multiple layer display, dark mode, and HTML legends. I added all the app-specific function keys I’ve been using recently — I expect no one else will need these exactly, but maybe it will be cool to have a demo of the kinds of extra functions you can pack in to a board like this.
My most important purpose with this project remains an explanation of how this board helped me, so that if you’re suffering from RSI, you can make an informed decision before buying one. These keyboards are expensive and take a serious time investment before you are productive on them. I’ve been there, staring at the checkout page with wrists and arms that hurt so bad I can’t type any more today, willing to pay 10x the price if it worked, but afraid to commit to something that might distract from a real solution, or even make it worse.
If you’ve got RSI, I hope this helps.