I need an ergo keyboard to avoid RSI. The first one I tried was this monster $300 Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which I picked because it was the most highly rated one on Amazon, it looked cool, and I thought it would solve my problem. It did not. I could barely type letters on it, and some of the common programming characters, like [{}] were in the "wrong" spot relative to where my fingers thought they should be.

I sent that bad boy back in under a week and settled on the MS Ergo Sculpt. It has a standard layout that works great for me, and I credit it with keeping me in the industry for the past 3 years, and, hopefully, far beyond.

The Kinesis has been my workhorse for the last 4 years and now I have 2 (one at the office). I think with any reprogramming it takes a while to settle in; when I switched over to this from a standard keyboard was also when I took the plunge to relearn touch typing with the Colemak layout - productivity plunge as I struggled to do even 15WPM. Now I'm at 82-90WPM.

I also use colemak and a kinesis and I honestly think it was the best decision of my career. I held off on buying a kinesis for a long time because they’re expensive and I greatly regret doing that. Its not at all about speed for me and I don’t know my WPM, its about comfort and avoiding RSI (I’ve had some problems in the past).

Now when I see people hammering their crappy keyboards, my fingers hurt for them and I wonder why more people who need their hands to work don’t invest in protecting them, but I get it, because I held off buying my kinesis for years due to the cost...

Funny, I didn’t hesitate for a second about the cost. I would have considered it well worth it to spend $300 on a new keyboard every month to be able to keep my well paying career.

It sounds like you had worse RSI problems than I did (and when I was first considering getting one, I didn’t have much problems and wanted one more as a precaution). Do you have any thoughts as to why you couldn’t get used to the Kinesis or found it hard?

I’d been touch typing on a standard keyboard since I was in 4th grade. Inertia, I guess.

I assume you would have gotten used to it then, but given that you found another keyboard that works for you, I guess it wouldn't have been worthwhile.

Yeah, that's the thing. When I bought it, I was starting down the path to permanent disability if I didn't do something. And, I couldn't afford to be at 1/10 or 1/4 typing speed, because I still needed to produce at work.

The Kinesis would actually have been fine, if I could have figured out how to get the programming-related characters to map properly to my brain. Typing on it was such a WTF experience for me that I couldn't continue, and it turned me off even trying to reprogram it.

But, the Ergo Sculpt was just like "plug it in. Go." The only weirdness I've experienced with it is that some of them work fine with the Macbook Pro, and some of them don't. It seems to have to do with what model the USB transmitter is, but I don't have a big enough sample to know for sure. I was lucky the first one I bought just worked, because otherwise I probably would have sent it back and gotten a different one. I did have to do a return / swap on the second one I ordered (one for home, and one for the office). When either of them die, they will get replaced with something similar, if not the exact model.

> some of the common programming characters

I’m not sure what problems you had “barely typing letters on it”, because I personally got used the that part extremely quickly and found it comfortable.. but I agree that some of the characters are placed in rather unfamiliar place, however, you can remap them. Better yet, I use a foot pedal (the three pedal one, I use one pedal as shift, a second as Fn and still haven’t mapped the third to anything) and just mapped the symbols to foot oedal (fn) + home row keys for super easy typing (although over the years I got used to their default positions more and stopped using the Fn+home row mappings, I should revisit them)

Agreed.

I started using the (external) Apple keyboard but it really threw me off.

Got a regular sized keyboard to plug on the Mac, works fine for me (with the added bonus of real PgUp/PgDown and Home/End keys).