I went down the novel design mechanical keyboard hole last year. I had been coding on a kinesis advantage for ages but why not try I thought. I now have a shelf

I went down the novel design mechanical keyboard hole last year. I had been coding on a kinesis advantage for ages but why not try I thought. I now have a shelf of very pretty but very shitty typing experiences. - plank/preonic ortholinear boards. Fine, the advantage is ortholinear so the adjustment wasn't too terrible, but the advantage's thumb cluster beats the living shit out of the plank/preionic's bottom row. Also all flat not comfrotable. - Viterbi (from keeb.io).. this was me thinking, this could work maybe if I could just get over the crampedness of the preonic keyboard i would be happier (Viterbi is split in half preonic mostly) .. nope. - 60% w/ split spacebar in a nice wooden travel case for travel etc. Working on the laptop keyboard is literal torture, and the advantage isn't very portable at all. It's ... ok, the lack of a proper arrow cluster sucks, got used to layers for Fkeys, the sixcluster and arrows on a layer under wasd and ijkl depending on what hand i wanted to use. It's ok, sometimes it still flys with me. - Minvan 40% .. mostly bought on a whim, sucks badly, I guess if I weren't coding it would be ok, but the increased use of symbols and non-letters is problematic on all these layouts. Too much cognitive overhead (where did I put the ampersand again...) Now I knew less keys were not going to be solving my problems. - Ergodox. I have some minor qualms with the advantage mostly size but also the case is quite hollow and noisy. Also they sell a limited array of switches for it (blue, brown, red .. I'm a brown guy, I like a little tactile feedback). Coming from the advantage this thing just sucks, very much the same layout (with a few extra keys) but flat flat flat, making it much harder to reach characters. Those advantage wells are amazing. The thumb cluster is also just worse due to the flatness. I actually gave this keyboard away. - Iris (keeb.io) ... slightly better than the ergodox but less keys than the advantage. Tried it for a few weeks, felt limiting for coding. Have played videogames with it, works pretty well for that. It stays on my desk for that purpose. - Dactyl - Finally I printed a dactyl. This is a great board for a travel board for me. It's essentially an open source kinesis advantage. I already had a 3d printer, had one printed, soldered and running in a week. Put some very nice zealious zilent switches in it. It's awesome. I still an advantage at home (though I replaced it's controller with a custom one that runs QMK, filled it with foam to deaden the din and am considering contacting the manufacturer for some spare parts so I can put some other switches in it) .. My only reservation is around the 3d printing, I wish I could get a solid plastic shell or it milled out of aluminum or something a little lighter (aluminum being extra weight when I travel .. if i ever travel again). But custom work like that is very cost prohibitive. So anyways, that was my journey down the rabbit hole of niche keyboard designs. I mostly still use the advantage, with an iris for gaming, and a dactyl for travel.