3 ms·

Staggered keys. Seriously? I'll never stop being amazed by how conservative these designs are.

• gnulinux 8y ago
  Same, it's like "hey let's completely redesign this product but leave critical elements as remnants of the 19th century type writers".
• IronBacon 8y ago
  I have an Ergodox and a TECK (I prefer the latter to the Ergodox) and I cringe every time I need to use a "standard" (horizontally) staggered keyboard. It boggles my mind on how this industry continue to adopt a layout that was the result of technical limitations of the 1800, fuck ergonomics, we don't want to confuse our customers... Bah!
  • brodsky 8y ago
    Could also be due to the product being aimed at touch typist audience with lots of muscle memory of traditional keyboards?
    • IronBacon 8y ago
      Not in my opinion. I think I've learned to touch type on a mechanical Olivetti typewriter, the hand stance was different and it required a lot, and I mean it a lot of force applied to the keys to print a character, anyway I probably used to touch type on staggered keyboards for more than 10 years, the transition to columnar keyboards was painless and I'm not going back. The only two problematic keys are probably Y and B where you can learn to reach both with the same hand (I think my instructor left us freedom and I probably used the right index for both). I switched 2~3 years ago to Colemak, I thought Dvorak moved too much keys around, and I have the impression that I'm slower than when I was on Qwerty and I still confuse the R with the S (I need to think to press the key instead of simply thinking the word, that is more than a decade of muscle memory) so you have a sample of one that is a weak argument. ^__^;