Vicissitudes

my experience with the Glove80

As mentioned in my previous post stating 5 facts about me, I revealed that I was somewhat of a keyboard nerd and that I have spent an unfathomable amount of money on keyboards that the average person should never replicate. Seeing that my collection has grown over the years, I thought that I would introduce one of my more unique and interesting keyboards and share my experiences with it.

Now, I will go into a little bit of backstory to give some context of why I bought this particular keyboard. For most of my life, whatever keyboard was attached to or supplied with the computer I was using was just fine with me. I rarely gave any thought to the device resting beneath my fingertips.

I was always an avid computer user from a young age and have since become a software engineer. This meant that in a day my hands were at one point or another typing along a surface that was in no way designed to be a comfortable workstation. Over the months working on projects and other personal obligations that required the use of the computer, I slowly started to feel a dull pain in my wrists which I feared could develop into repetitive strain injury (RSI). This led me to investigate how to best deal with this and watching videos made by other people suffering from the same issue.

This search eventually led me to stumbling upon the weird and wonderful rabbit hole of ergonomic keyboards. I watched countless videos on YouTube from channels like ShortCircuit, pinguefy, and Code to the Moon.

In the end, it was a video made by Code to the Moon they made about the Glove80 that really piqued my interest. I was initially attracted to its appearance, but after watching through the video in its entirety and hearing about the plethora of features, I was convinced that I had to get one.

The Glove80

The Glove80 is an ergonomic keyboard designed and sold by a New Zealand based company called MoErgo. From the get go you can really tell they cared about actual ergonomics. Their website is plastered with text telling the story of the Glove80’s design. It’s undeniably impressive; over 500 experiments and prototypes are laid out in detail. The journey of assumptions being made, challenged, rethought and re-challenged is a testament to the designers’ dedication to arriving at the best possible ergonomic solution.

As I'm writing this, I’m almost half a year into using the Glove80 as my semi-full time keyboard. After receiving the keyboard, I instantly set it up by changing the keyboard layout to Colemak-DH, and also customised some of the layout to truly fit my preferences and use case. I went with Colemak-DH because I really liked the appeal of a more ergonomic layout on top of an ergonomic keyboard. I was going all in on ergonomics for this keyboard.

This sudden shift to the use of a completely unfamiliar keyboard layout on an ortholinear split keyboard really killed my typing speed and productivity. In the first few weeks, I reluctantly kept switching back to my previous keyboard when I had to actually do work, as my typing speed was terrible at first and using the Glove80 would actually result in a decrease in productivity. Where I was typing on average 140 WPM on a regular QWERTY keyboard, I was reaching only 20 WPM on the Glove80.

To be honest, it was frustrating to use it at first. I was promised that this keyboard had been "uncompromisingly designed to deliver the best ergonomic typing experience possible", instead I was met with a steep learning curve and an unintuitive placement of keys.

However, after the first few months went by, I was still determined to make the full use of this keyboard. That was when I decided to go full-time with the Glove80 when I wasn't working so as to force myself to learn and adapt to this unfamiliar keyboard. I used websites like Colemak Academy to familiarise myself with the Colemak-DH layout to a point where I could touch type. I also kept tweaking my layout through the user-friendly layout editor made by MoErgo.

Just by doing this and spending more time typing on the Glove80, I slowly but surely got better and more used to the design choices and faster at typing. Typing on it actually felt super comfortable due to the tenting position of the keyboard, as well as the fact that I could have the two halves at approximately shoulder width on my desk. This made for a very satisfying experience as my fingers would have to barely move relative to a regular keyboard. The typing experience was so enjoyable that I wasn't experiencing anymore wrist pain even after hours of typing on it.

I've even managed to reach 100 WPM recently on the Glove80. However, I still defer back to using my previous keyboard for work as I have not found a good layout where I can code efficiently yet.

All in all, in spite of the high cost to purchase as well as the very steep learning curve, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a comfortable, yet capable keyboard which makes good on its promise as "a new standard for ergonomic keyboards"!

I'll give a short summary of pros and cons of this keyboard that I've experienced in my 6 months of using it as a TLDR.

Pros

Cons

7/31

#Blaugust2024 #keyboard