I was very excited when ortholinear keyboards started to catch on, but then something happened and this ultra-minimalist stuff started pouring out with column staggering and now once again long for someone to make a good ortholinear split keyboard with all of the proper buttons it should have for being actually useful for software development or gaming.
Do all of the users of these just spend their time in vim? I cannot fathom how they’re used otherwise.
It's got full letters + numbers + what you'd expect in terms of tab/ctrl/shift/meta/etc, 2 thumbs and some 4 extra inner keys for macros or whatever (mirrored on both sides).
It's great. I have a symbol layer so most stuff is on the home row, but I can easily play games without having werido layers or incantations (besides swapping from colemak to qwerty). Having the extra keys means I dont need any combo-layers etc. It's just uh, very practical... You can always just have tighter "everyday" layering if you dont want movement, but without the physical keys you seem to drastically cut out any options.
I never understood going super small unless you are traveling and take it everywhere with your laptop or have super tight desk space. Even then, my enormous huge gigantic 56key split is still only about as big as a 10keyless. I waste more space putting my note pad and food in between the two halves.
It's an comparatively ancient keyboard, 10 years old now probably, and it was my first, so I didn't really know what I wanted re switches and caps. It's so old its all hand soldered, no hot swapping. I do like you, periodically peek around at splits to upgrade but I think I will have to go down the custom PCB route to really get what I want.
At least now most are starting to ditch TRRS interconnect cables for USB-C which never made much sense to me. At the bottom end I could believe, 10 years ago, that maybe the USBC parts were more expensive and the extra $2 wasn't worth it (I dont agree but I follow the reasoning...), but the ZSA Moonlander sells for $360 USD and still uses a TRRS. Imagine melting $180 because you plugged the cables in the wrong order!? At that price it just seems lazy, or cheap, or that you actually don't have the engineering skills to build a product and are just reselling cobbled together opensource designs. (Edit: Their new keyboard the Voyager from a year or two ago also still uses TRRS!) The SOL was pretty ahead of its time for some reason on that front.
Though I think if I make my own I might go with a RJ11 for aesthetics.
I recommend the glove 80 for split ortholinear mechanical keyboards. It’s got plenty of of keys for coding. Also you can mount it to camera tripods and actually use it when tilted which really improves ergonomic factor.
I have the Kinesis Advantage 360 which is split but has all the non-numpad buttons.
I do spend lots of time in Emacs, but also use it for plenty of gaming. Just remap in-game to ESDF and only use the left hand. (Or set up layers, but I'm generally too lazy for that).
I think the thumb clusters are great, but may not be to your taste. I'm very happy with it, but have used various iterations of kinesis keyboards for a long time now.
If you’re looking at custom design, there’s plenty of everything.
The column stagger is quite good though, especially to make up for the little finger being shorter.
Fewer buttons is a less obvious improvement, but it does help to reduce hand movement. I’m programming and gaming just fine without F keys or a number row, for example. And there are good commercial designs that have such keys, like the Glove 80.
I use an ergodox EZ, due to a severe injury in my 20s. Frequently used symbols are on some of the extra keys, less frequently used ones are accessed via a shift combo. By week 2 I was faster on it than a QWERTY keyboard. I don't game on it.
Do all of the users of these just spend their time in vim? I cannot fathom how they’re used otherwise.