Split Ergonomic Keyboard - It Was Worth It

Kelton Halbert

Published: 2025-06-22

Contents

Introduction

I spend nearly all of my work day sitting down at a desk, in front of a computer screen. Beyond that, I spend a lot of my free time in front of a computer screen — whether it’s coding side projects, playing some video games with friends, or writing blog posts about obscure things and sending them out into the digital ether. I had not really ever spent much time thinking about the thing I use most to interface with my computer during all of this screen time: my keyboard. That is, until I started to get some rather annoying wrist and forearm pain at the end of any work days that involved rigorous amounts of typing. It turns out that standard keyboards kind of suck, and I’m surprised it took this long for me to encounter enough friction to do something about it. Though the history of keyboards and the QWERTY layout could be an interesting blog post, I’m going to keep this as focused as I can to what I learned during my research into alternative keyboards and my experience using one for the last few months in the hopes that someone else finds this insightful and useful.

The TLDR is that after getting a split ergonomic keyboard, it took me about a week (with regular usage and practice) to get back to 80% proficiency, back to 100% proficiency by week 2, and exceeding my previous typing proficiency since then. The increase in proficiency is largely due to gains from learning how to work with a keyboard that has a thumb cluster and key modifiers that make accessing things such as the numpad, arrow keys, and symbols significantly more efficient than a standard full-sized QWERTY keyboard. Admittedly, some of this is also due to increasingly leaning into a keyboard-only style of working with computers and text editors ala Neovim.

Standard Keyboards Suck

There are several reasons why standard QWERTY keyboards are sub-optimal, and there are a lot of well-researched resources from actual experts in ergonomics out there for you to check out if you want to know more. The gist of what I want to communicate to you is this: nothing about the design or layout of the keyboards we use daily make any sense at all for modern computer usage. Have you ever noticed how the keys on your keyboard have the rows staggered? That’s an artifact from typewriters, where it was a design choice intended to keep the mechanical levers of typewriters from colliding with each other. The QWERTY keyboard layout? While there are many myths, rumors, and urban legends as to how the actual layout came about, this also has its origins in early typewriters. Not to mention, hitting symbol keys, OS keys, and arrow keys require a lot of additional reach and movement. These legacy choices from over a hundred years ago have unintended consequences on our wrists and arms after prolonged usage, and can encourage some bad posture habits as well. Now, you can mitigate some of the impacts these design choices have on wrists, forearms, and posture without changing keyboards… however, I found that I was personally dealing with issues of bunching my hands up on the keyboard with awkward wrist angles, and hunching in over my keyboard too. I would try to correct these things, only to find I would subconsciously slip back into those bad habits. I decided that maybe it was time to try fixing the problem at the keyboard-level instead, and at least for me personally, it was worth it.

If you would like to know a little bit more about conventional keyboards, and especially more about staggered vs. ortholinear keyboard layouts, this video was rather insightful and ultimately resulted in me choosing an ortholinear layout as one of my keyboard criteria mentioned further below.

My Personal Criteria

Once you get into the rabbit hole of ergonomic keyboards, it can become quite overwhelming when you realize the number of choices you are faced with. You can ditch the stagger and go with an ortholinear layout (column-oriented), you can chose to use a standard or a split keyboard set up, there are keyboards that have keywells that dip downward, and you can even change the key layout from QWERTY to something like DVORAK. These were a few of the decisions and criteria I settled on when conducting my search for a new keyboard.

  • I didn’t want to learn a completely new keyboard layout — stick with QWERTY.
    • I still occasionally have to use standard keyboards on the weather forecast desk, on my laptop, and on other people’s computers. I didn’t want to effectively handicap myself from being able to do these things once I built up the new muscle memory.
  • I wanted something portable I could use both at home and at work, and potentially with my laptop. If I am going to make a big switch, I want to be consistent.
  • I did not want to have to fight with custom firmware issues, especially since I am limited in what I can install and configure at work. Working on government systems is not a super flexible environment.
  • I was interested in trying an ortholinear layout.
  • I was interested in trying a split keyboard with thumb clusters.
  • I wanted something I was not going to have to ultimately replace.
    • Wireless keyboards are nice, but not many support replaceable batteries… meaning that after a few years, they’re effectively wired keyboards anyway.

Given these criteria, I settled on the ZSA Voyager - a split, ergonomic, ortholinear, portable keyboard. It meets all of the above criteria, and after a few months of using it, I’m not sure I can ever go back.

The Voyager by ZSA Technology Labs

Using the ZSA Voyager

As mentioned in the TLDR, it took about a week of using this keyboard to reach 80% of my prior typing accuracy and speed, an additional week to reach 100%, and now a few months in, I’d say I now exceed my prior baseline. I should note that I already knew how to “properly” touch type from the “home row” (though with a few bad habits), so most of the work was in learning how to work with the ortholinear layout and the key modifiers. The additional gains are in large part to learning how to use the thumb clusters and the modifier keys. However, before getting into that, I want to talk about the keyboard itself…

Since this keyboard costs just north of $350, I spent a full week doing research to make sure that this would 1) meet or exceed my criteria and 2) be a one-time purchase I will not have to revisit anytime soon. While the full stress test of time has not fully run its course, I’m confident that it was worth the money and the slight friction of getting used to it. The build quality of the keyboard is excellent — it has a metal body that gives it weight and a high quality feel, the magnetic tenting feet are incredibly sturdy, the key cap and switch quality feel better than my prior mechanical keyboard, and it works out of the box on all of my machines and operating systems (something that cannot be said for all customizable ergonomic keyboards). The keyboard also came with several extra key caps, a key cap puller, a few extra switches, several cables of varying lengths for different desk setups (the cables are not braided, but they are well-made, high-quality feeling cables), and a really convenient carrying case that fits well in my backpack. Given the price I was expecting something that felt premium, and this certainly does.

The keyboard is fully customizable with a web-based configurator and firmware flasher, which means no fiddling around with cumbersome custom firmware! Though, admittedly, the default configured layout of the Voyager has been excellent for my needs. The only layout change I have considered is the ’~’ key, which currently requires 3 key-presses for me to activate. The only reason I have not changed it yet is out of laziness, though I may follow up this post with that modification…

The image below shows the default layout when holding the modifier keys (highlighted in white on the thumb cluster).

The default layout of the Voyager and its modifier keys

Something else worth mentioning is that the web-based keyboard configurator has several typing exercises and practice routines (some are even code specific, letting you choose a language and practice) useful for making the transition. I spent about 45 minutes each evening going through a series of provided keyboard exercises, and it really helped in making the transition quickly. If you do decide to make the switch, whether to the Voyager or another split keyboard layout, don’t underestimate the value of practicing during your transition to that keyboard. It will make things a whole lot smoother for you!

My review of the keyboard itself is far from exhaustive, and it is always good to get a second opinion if you are intrigued by this. While this review is from a software developer that has gone much further down the keyboard rabbit hole than I ever will, I still think it is an excellent review for lay people as well. He also goes into some detail about keyboards and ergonomics.

A Noticeable Difference in Posture and Comfort

All of this started because I was getting wrist and arm pain and was dealing with bad posture. So after the last few months, have I noticed a difference? To put it short and sweet: absolutely. I don’t notice any strain in my fingers, and my wrists and forearms don’t hurt at the end of the day. With the split keyboard layout, my arms sit straight out from my shoulders, resulting in a significant improvement in my sitting posture. The difference was stark and noticeable almost immediately! The ability to spend a long day typing and coding without pain at the end of it is a significant improvement in my quality of life and well-being. There’s not much more to say about it — it solved the problem I was hoping it would, but it also has resulted in other benefits.

A Keyboard-First Mentality

I have been using Vim for my code and text editing for a long time. In undergrad and graduate school, I spent a lot of time working on remote machines and Linux compute clusters over SSH, and there was always one thing guaranteed to be there: Vim. Over the last 2-3 years, I have made the transition to Neovim. Neovim is a widely popular community fork of Vim that has excellent support for the sorts of things you’ve probably gotten used to in tools like VSCode, such as autocomplete, syntax highlighting, language servers, and so much more. While I have contemplated making a blog post about Neovim, this is not that post… but the primary philosophy of Vim/Neovim is one that is keyboard-first. Why would you move your hand to the mouse to scroll, change files, or really do anything else at all if you could quickly and easily do so without lifting your hand from the keyboard? Switching to a split ergonomic keyboard significantly complimented this workflow and computer philosophy. So much so that I’ve really started leaning into it by learning to use keyboard-based window managers in Linux such as i3. Editing files, switching desktop work spaces, and launching and switching applications are now all done without lifting my hand from the keyboard.

This is all ancillary to the problem I set out to solve by getting a split ergonomic keyboard, but I felt it was worth mentioning the knock on effect it’s had in other areas after being more intentional about how I use my computers in my day-to-day life.

Final Thoughts

I’m not here to say you should or shouldn’t get a split ergonomic keyboard, nor am I saying that if you do get one, you need to adopt this keyboard-first mentality when working with your computers. However, I have absolutely noticed the benefits of switching beyond just improving the ergonomics of my daily life. If you deal with pain after long days of typing, however, start doing some research and see if this is something that can help you. Ergonomics can be quite specific and personal to your body and workspace, so what works for me may not necessarily work for you… but I can promise you the relatively minimal effort in doing the research and making the transition to something beyond the bog-standard keyboard is well worth your time and effort. The only negative I have encountered so far is that some friction is inevitable when switching back to a normal keyboard, though sticking with a standard QWERTY keyboard layout has definitely minimized any issues. Still, that friction has been far from anything that significantly disrupts my workflow when working on the weather forecast desk, and I find that after a few minutes, I’m able to mostly adapt again.

This blog post was brought to you by my ZSA Voyager, composed in Neovim (with a Markdown plugin) on Fedora Linux 42. Man, I’m practically becoming a linux greybeard meme at this point… but I’d rather have control over my life and technology rather than outsourcing it to Microsoft. Apple still has me in its clutches, though. Anyway, if you found any of this interesting and useful, I’d love to hear from you.