I work with the author at Nuon. He initially used a Kinesis like some coworkers, but refined it to a minimalist setup with an open-source Korne keyboard, that sits on top of his Macbook keyboard.

When I first saw it, he initially had rubber bands holding it down. Now it's on a secure plate with even a company-coordinated color scheme for the keys.

Interesting how his gaming experience led to a custom layer setup.

For anyone looking into this who doesn't want to design their own layout from scratch, a well maintained layout for small keyboards is Miryoku. Worked very well for me (in qwerty base + vim directional keys mode) on a keyboardio atreus

  A strange thing is that many come in to the small split keyboard world and then don't have the motivation to come up with something that works for them.   You can make anything work, so a lot make Miryoku work but I doubt for many that would be the best layout for them.

   I code a lot and find that its layout would not suit me. I have 99% of what I need on a the base layer and one more layer for doing development work - on a 36 key board.  I could not imagine that I would want to switch layers as much as I would have to  for a continuous stream of alphabet/symbols and numbers.

   I think Miryoku would be fine if you were an average computer user editing documents, emails etc and I do sometimes forget that there are a lot of guys out there using Miryoku doing only that.

disclaimer: I'm the ceo of this company.

What started as a joke a few years ago has actually turned into really good signal. I've found that the engineers who care enough to invest in keyboards like this spend a lot of time investing in their tooling and are extremely productive.

Causation or correlation?

Curious have any of you tried the Charachorder? It's supposed to be the fastest "keyboard" to type on.

the principles aren't sound

> To promote balanced usage, ... equal distribution eliminates the strain of overextending the right fingers

What overextension? You don't even type them frequently enough for your index/middle finger on the home row to notice anything, and "cognitive overhead" is lower if they're paired together.

And neither is this strategy

> we reach up for numbers,..This strategic approach ensures that my layout and daily typing tasks never overwhelm my cognitive load.

The default numbers are so inconveniently placed that you don't really get much proficiency in using them, so you'll not lose much if you switch from some great numpad layout back to horizontal line just like using regular numpad has no effect on your ability to use the horizontal row And numpad can't overwhelm anything since is extremely common

This is just bad strategy, using superficial logic to hurt ergonomics.

The familiarity with more rarely used symbols might add overhead if broken, but maybe if symbols are mapped to the same numbers it won't be much? (this is at least plausible unlike with the numbers themselves)

I often read about all those RSI problems and then how pinky fingers have a lot of duties. I find it strange. I type at decent speed and I barely use my pinky fingers at all. I press Caps-Lock, Tab, Shift and Enter with them as well as | and }. Pinkies are small and weak, why use them so much? That's surely neither ergonomic nor the fastest way to type. It also means I don't like the idea of a split keyboard. I reach across quite often. I've never recorded myself to be 100% sure about all the keys but I am regularly reaching for b and y with both hands depending on the word. This way "typo" is just two quick "progressing" taps - "ty" with the left hand and "po" with the right. Of course "po" is way more comfortable with a ring-middle finger instead of a pinky/ring finger.

The whole idea of assigning keys to fingers doesn't sound too smart to me. Why would you type "ce" with the same finger? It's neither fast nor ergonomic. Why do it to yourself?

>Home row mods live in the base layer. In my opinion, home row mods are nearly essential to make a layout this small work well. The idea is simple: your home row keys act as normal keys when tapped, but double as modifiers when held.

I feel this is underexplored idea. After remapping my CapsLock to tap=Esc, hold=ctrl it went from the least used key on my keyboard to the most used one. I really like the idea of also doing it with home row keys, that must be very convenient after getting used to. That also seems completely free as you never (I think) hold those keys during normal computer use.