I was in the same boat, doing most text navigation on the keyboard and fully adapted to the quirky arrangement of home/end/pgup/pgdn of the Microsoft natural keyboard elite I’d been coding on for 23 years.
But I do a lot of nomading, so I really wanted a small keyboard. And I’m a tall guy, so I was looking for a full split (I tried the Kinesis Freestyle2 for a while but didn’t love it).
I bought a ZSA Voyager. The first day I went from ~120wpm to 20. I hated it and had buyer’s remorse. Second week, I was still switching to another keyboard in the afternoons because I was making so many typos and felt so tired. I swapped out most of the switches with higher force ones, and that helped a ton. It took about two months before the keyboard disappeared again and there was only me and the work.
The biggest single win is that backspace is under my right thumb next to space bar, which felt life-changing once I got used to it (if I were still using a normal keyboard, I’d probably re-map right alt to backspace). And while word selection with ctrl+shift+arrow took a bit longer to get used to, now I appreciate not having to move my fingers at all to hit the arrow keys.
Nine months later, you can pry the Voyager from my cold dead hands. It’s probably the last keyboard I’ll ever buy. I do wish it had two more keys (haven’t found good homes for Alt and ~) but overall I’m very happy with where I ended up.
I was in the same boat, doing most text navigation on the keyboard and fully adapted to the quirky arrangement of home/end/pgup/pgdn of the Microsoft natural keyboard elite I’d been coding on for 23 years.
But I do a lot of nomading, so I really wanted a small keyboard. And I’m a tall guy, so I was looking for a full split (I tried the Kinesis Freestyle2 for a while but didn’t love it).
I bought a ZSA Voyager. The first day I went from ~120wpm to 20. I hated it and had buyer’s remorse. Second week, I was still switching to another keyboard in the afternoons because I was making so many typos and felt so tired. I swapped out most of the switches with higher force ones, and that helped a ton. It took about two months before the keyboard disappeared again and there was only me and the work.
The biggest single win is that backspace is under my right thumb next to space bar, which felt life-changing once I got used to it (if I were still using a normal keyboard, I’d probably re-map right alt to backspace). And while word selection with ctrl+shift+arrow took a bit longer to get used to, now I appreciate not having to move my fingers at all to hit the arrow keys.
Nine months later, you can pry the Voyager from my cold dead hands. It’s probably the last keyboard I’ll ever buy. I do wish it had two more keys (haven’t found good homes for Alt and ~) but overall I’m very happy with where I ended up.