I haven’t been keeping up with the latest group buys and trends, but I saw the TGR Alice on r/mk a few days ago and I’ve been wondering if anyone has done anything similar, just hopefully a little bit less exclusive.
I personally am 100% sold on the Minidox/CRKBD, which has become my favorite keyboard by far, so this isn’t for me; several of my coworkers swear by their Microsoft Natural keyboard layout and want something similar, but mechanical.
This looks like a decent possible option (and it’s actually in-stock, which is fantastic!). That warning is a little scary, though. Guess it’s time to look up some reviews…
Gotta say, it’s crazy to me how much the community has exploded in the past few years. I remember mech ergo boards being a white whale for such a long time, and now we have a bunch of options I didn’t even know existed.
How has using the central navigation cluster been? Do you reach For example for left and right keys, do you reach with index fingers while remaining on the home position or does your hole hand move to cover the whole arrow cluster?
To be honest I don’t use the center cluster all that much but when I do I shift my whole hand over. I used an Atreus62 as my daily driver for a long time so I got used to relying on a second layer. I have arrow keys under hjkl and still use those out of habit most of the time; however, I like having the dedicated keys in the center for combinations like ctrl+shift+arrow, etc.
Also, having the center cluster separates the left and right sides to a comfortable distance similar to the Kinesis Advantage (Which was also my daily driver for a long time) without wasting space by having nothing there.
I think keys on each row needs should be horizontally aligned. While staggering looks more ergonomic, it makes key positions more erratic and harder to touch type.