I have an Ergodox EZ sitting collecting dust these days. I got a great deal of use out of it and before long I was compiling my own firmware and making use of v

I have an Ergodox EZ sitting collecting dust these days. I got a great deal of use out of it and before long I was compiling my own firmware and making use of various advanced QMK features that were not available through the online visual layer configuration tool. The keyboard has great build quality, the customer service is great (I got a free replacement for the right half after an issue with one of the keys), the ortholinear layout isn't that difficult to get used to, but ultimately the issue for me was that my hands aren't big enough to use the keyboard comfortably or to type as accurately as I'd like / as I'm used to typing. I'm now back on my Apple Magic Keyboard and happier than ever, though with a few tweaks and improvements taken from my time using the Ergodox EZ. I am now using kanata[1] which allows me to have multiple QMK-style layers on my regular old keyboard. This is already a huge step up from my pre-Ergodox days! I also like that I can have my layer configurations version controlled in a plain old git/dotfiles repo. Since the layers are handled at the software level, I wrote my own integration with kanata, called komokana[2] to switch keyboard layers programmatically based on different state events emitted from my tiling window manager[3]. What that means in practice is that my keyboard can automatically switch to an app-specific layer when that app's window is focused, or to a workspace specific layer, or to a browser tab-specific layer, or really just switch on any event emitted by the window manager or any specific window manager state. For me, this is really the killer feature of my setup now, and one that I don't think would be anywhere near as easy to implement with QMK which sits at the hardware level. The jump from having to trigger layer changes via key presses or holds to having my keyboard automagically switch to the layer I want for a given application is almost as big as the jump from having no layers to having layers. There is just no going back once you've experienced it. [1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata https://github.com/jtroo/kanata [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana [3]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi