3 posts tagged “kinesis keyboard”

I just received a PM here, that was to the point:

Do you still use it. Whats your impression now? Can you recommend it.

The answer is very easy. It is quite simply the best keyboard I've ever used.  I don't think it is possible to recommend it more to someone, especially if that someone is dealing with RSI.

While I do think that it is more difficult to program with the Kinesis versus a normal keyboard (mostly because the thumbs get overworked because of various combinations that involve ctrl, meta, alt, etc.) the end result is still much better.  Perhaps it should just be thought of as that real excuse to write better documentation.

It worked flawless in Linux, and continues the run now that I've switched over to OS X.  The ability to quickly program it takes some of the pain away from switching from Linux and OS X, too (and to a lesser degree, the frustrations with programming listed above)

Since I've purchased the keyboard, though, it has thrown into my world just how non-ergonomic my setup was.  As such, I've purchased a new desk and an adjustable keyboard tray for use here.  Both were fantastic purchases, and have helped tremendously in my work comfort.

So, to recap the main points:

1. The keyboard is fantastic.
2. The keyboard is less friendly for coding than it is for writing, but only negligibly so.
3. Remapping keys is the solution
4. Be prepared to upgrade other things as you remove the other non-ergonomic things in your environment

Now that I've berated DataHand enough, I can get onto the meat of the keyboard.  I've been using the keyboard for the last week, and this is day 8 with it.  I was out of town for a day, so I really have only been using it for 7 days.

Initial Delivery and Unboxing
It's always fantastic to unbox new hardware.  I love it.  This was no different, but first I'd like to talk about the shipping.  I placed the order on Sunday, got an automated email asking for them to email them the verification number for my credit card and I responded with all the necessary information.  Monday morning I had an order confirmation, and later in the day I had a shipping confirmation.  Good sign.  I paid for the cheapest shipping method available: UPS Ground for $5.

I checked the tracking page for UPS Tuesday morning, and was shocked to see that it was out for delivery.  Double victory, and what a great way to start the day.  Kinesis is based out of the Seattle area, and it is only a 3 hour drive from my town to theirs, so it is still reasonable to get UPS to deliver in a day.  However, given I was paying for the cheap shipping I was half-way expecting them to just hold it in their warehouse as punishment.

The package was delivered a bit after noon, and it was fun to open.  My wife at this point was wondering what was wrong with me when I pulled the camera out to snap these photos.

Hookup
Hook up was a breeze.  The keyboard has a 2-port USB hub in the back, so I unhooked my old keyboard and mouse (all with my workstation happily chugging away at KDE) and plugged the mouse into the Kinesis keyboard and everything went great.  It just worked.

Typing 101
For some background, I type fast.  I mean it.  Really fast, like you would probably utter something when you saw me type and wonder just what was wrong with me.  The last time I took a typing test I hit an average rate of 147 words per minute (for one page of text) with 96% accuracy.  That was in the prime of my youth when I was probably 17 or 18 so I'm probably much worse now.  Probably only 140wpm with 94% accuracy.  Pathetic.

Just like my typing when I got in this keyboard!  My hands did to typing what William Hung did to #!.  It would have been funny if I wasn't trying to get work done.  Luckily, the initial adaptation period had very little code that needed to get done.  I still had to type a lot though, but I stuck with it.  The manual says it takes approximately 3 days to get used to it.  After the first day, I was honestly not hopeful.  The following day I had to fly out of town, and was gone from very early to very late, so I didn't touch the keyboard for more than 2 minutes.

Thursday was just as aggravating as Tuesday.  I floundered my way through the day, typing with the acumen of a fat-fingered man on a Blackberry.  Typos were everywhere.  Especially the C and V keys.  Because the Kinesis keyboard has a vertical key layout (meaning that the keys are not staggered like on a traditional keyboard, they are just in a vertical column) my left hand had no idea which finger to use for the C.  Both my index and middle fingers could miss it equally well.

The Ugly.
The other aspect that was (and is still) infuriating is how busy my right thumb is.  Below is a photo of the thumb keys.

  Now, this is where I can get mad at myself equally well.  As you can see in the photo, the only space key on the keyboard is sitting there for me right thumb to happily thwack away at.  Unfortunately, unless you maintain good posture it does get a bit uncomfortable.  If I get lazy, my thumb actually has to push but if I maintain good and recommended posture with having my wrist not resting on the pad it's more of a wrist twist to hit the space key and it feels just fine.  So, it's my fault, but still a bit annoying that I have such a busy right thumb and can't balance the workload with the left thumb... The other negative aspect of this is that I have a long standing habit over the last 20 years of hitting the space bar with both thumbs based on how I feel.

So, what happens is that I keep hitting backspace when I mean space.  Which, the way I was typing in the beginning would have resulted in a sentence like "hitting backspacwheImeaspac" and then a great deal of cursing.

The Good.
The pain that prompted me to buy this keyboard in the first place has subsided substantially.  Not to the point that I would say it is gone, but it seems like it is on its way out the door.  Cool.

Also, it is super clickity-clackity.  I'm talking model M clicky.  I love it.  The better thing is that the keys have very low resistance so you don't have to push hard and the travel is very short, so it is very comfortable to type on but you still get the satisfying click click click.  My wife doesn't like this fact, but I love it.  Love.

The programmability is awesome.  Being able to swap between dvorak and qwerty is a feature I'll never use, but nice to know it is there.  I have swapped keys to find a more comfortable programming keyset, and after trying various setups have gone back to the default keymap and just got used to it... Imagine they know best.  It works out very well, but programming to a great deal longer to get up to speed with.  I'm still making quite a few mistakes, but about up to 80% efficiency.  I tend to type faster than I think deeply about a problem, so unless I'm doing some yak-shaving simple code I don't notice it much.

The Bad
Certain commonly used keystrokes are very tedious.  Programming with vim is a pain, and the only keymap I left was swapping the escape key with the caps lock key.  Typically that should be a control key, so it's taken some mental conditioning to get used to it.  Especially because now the control key is a thumb-key.  I need to setup more programmatic keys for my window manager as well.  The ctrl+alt+<left|right> for desktop switching doesn't work out very well with this.  I have been thinking and thinking but can't come up with anything, so it is just a pain.  This is making me use the mouse more, since it seems more efficient to bump my hand over to the mouse than use the cryptic keymap.  I was thinking of setting up something like escape+page up/down, but haven't tried it yet.

The Verdict
All in all, I'm very pleased with it.  On Day 3 I was so frustrated I about boxed it up and sent it back.  The Saturday after I sat down to do some code hacking, and just decided to get stuff done.  It went slow, was frustrating but all in all I made good progress on the project at hand.  Towards the end of the day I was amazed at how easily the code was flowing.  I was still making a lot of typos, but they weren't as bad.  I wasn't getting flustered and typing 27 characters of absolute gibberish and swearing.  I was typing 2, catching it and fixing it without getting confused.

It is extremely comfortable.  I'd like to sample a vertical keyboard, but I don't it is as good as the Kinesis.  The contoured keyboard is awesome.  I am typing amazingly fast on it as well, probably back to my previous speed although I still am making too many typos (and they are nearly all centered around the damn C and V keys...)

Given the price tag, I don't think I would use my own money to buy it.  For a company keyboard, it is fantastic.  It behooves a company to pay for good ergonomic equipment, and for business use I really believe it is worth the money.  I'm very pleased with the purchase, and am waiting just a few more weeks before making the final statement of, "It's a keeper."

But for now, I am leaning heavily that way.
 

I've been dealing with a nuisance of a pain (or, as I tell my wife to get a massage, excruitiatingly annoying) in my arm for a while and have been trying to adjust a great deal of my work posture to deal with it.  Since I work from home, the burden of an ergonomics department falls squarely on my shoulders.  Which isn't ergonomic at all.

I have been looking at various keyboards and trying to find one that really works well, and is nice and ergonomic and all that.  For the last 10 years, ever since having an office next to an ergonomic consulting facility, I've been interested in the Kinesis Contour keyboards.  I've typed on a few of them for a few minutes at a time, but never really any large scale hacking.

Finally I decided to bite the bullet and get a high end ultra-ergonomic keyboard.  After searching around and comparing vertical keyboards, tented keyboards, contoured keyboards (of which Kinesis seems to be the only player) and then the crazy DataHand I came to the following conclusions:

• Tented keyboards don't seem any better than a typical wave form ergonomic keyboard.  They are also pricey.
• Vertical keyboards are just weird, and don't make good sense on a traditional desk.  I couldn't close my keyboard tray, and that would be annoying.
• Contoured keyboards are radical, but Kinesis has a money back guarantee.
• The DataHand... well, I don't want to go off on a rant, but here I go.

 
Ruling out the DataHand was remarkably easy.  It wasn't the price tag, it wasn't even the lack of any thorough reviews on it.  The reviews I did find were not even all that positive.  That still isn't the deal breaker.  The deal breaker is this (from their site):

Warranty:

• 90 Days Parts and Labor Warranty.

Return Policy:

• You may return a DataHand product within 15 days of the original ship date and if all original items complete and undamaged, a refund less 15% restock charge will be issued. Please call 1-800-233-6000 ext. 222 for a Return Authorization Number.

Lets break this down a bit.  First, a 90 day warranty on a $505 keyboard.  For $505 (and that is just the base model) I expect a warranty that covers everything and for a whole lot longer than 90 days.  That's just ridiculous.
 
Up next is the even more insulting return policy.  They are selling a remarkably different input device that would likely take more than 15 days even to acclimate yourself to, and telling you that if after you actually get up to speed if you find it to be a total crock and isn't any better than a typical keyboard, well, tough.  You're out your $505.  But lets just say that you are ultra-adaptive and after 14 days you decide that it just isn't worth the cost  so you call them up and ask for the refund.  Oh wait, you're over because it is 15 days of the original ship date.  Well, tough, lets hope you get it fast because now you reasonably have less than 10 days to get used to it.

Now, assuming at this point you're still on board and buy one but hate it and are still in the time frame of returning it, you can pay $75 + shipping to return it.

Wow.  That's just freaking awesome.  You can spend $100 just to test their theories about how you should interface with a computer.  I can't imagine who their clients are.  I actually can imagine who their clients are: movie studios and spaceships.  I'm probably wrong, but that's all I can come up with.

Still, I wasn't fully deterred until I sent an email asking if there was a way to try one out.  I was willing to drive a ways and see how it works.  I shoot off an email asking if their 15 day return policy is really what they intend, or just to deter window shoppers and sure enough it is real.  The response also mentions they'll look in their customer database to see if they have a customer in my area.

It gets even more surreal.  I can't imagine sitting here getting some work done and having my phone ring like that.  I can just see the dialog going something like this:

me: Hello?
DataHand: Hi, we have a potential customer that wants to use your keyboard.
me: I'm sorry, what? [you see, I would be too surprised by this asinine request to come up with something funny]
DataHand: This is DataHand, someone wants to try a DataHand and you're the closest customer.
me: Well, maybe you should get a better customer-facing setup going.  Seriously, wtf?
DataHand: Oh, come on, we'll bump your warranty to 100 days!
me: I've already had it for 101!
DataHand: But 100 is more than 90!
me: But... no, that's dumb!
DataHand: You bought a DataHand, come on... just think about it, 100 is MORE THAN 90.
me: Oh, right, good point... Send your boy over, lets get our DataHand on.

Total. WTF.

So, after thinking about all this and then learning that Kinesis has an awesome 60 day money back guarantee, you just pay shipping.  They're also fairly close to me, about 3 hours north of where I live.  I decided they're the right way to go, so I ordered a keyboard last Sunday.

I got the shipping confirmation on Monday, and had the keyboard on Tuesday (and I only paid for UPS Ground shipping, $5!).  Total cost, with sales tax, was a touch less than $400.

Up next, I'll write about my experiences with it.  Stay tuned...