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When was the last time some broke down in your home, and you had to call a handyman? And have you peeked into the bags with good quality tools they bring with them? I personally have never seen a handyman who dismisses quality tools to get the job done and here is a guess, why this is: they just don't want to pay the bill of not using them in the long run. Sure, you can get your job done with shitty tools that may break after some time. And that may actually be okay¹ in short term. But in "the long run" it may cost you not just the regular replacement of tools, but you may also get health-wise problems of not using good tools. As a handyman you might cut yourself because the screwdriver skid down, fall of that instable ladder, or suffer from long-term problems, because you used too much brawn while you instead could just have used a nice hammer drill to drill those holes in the concrete. This is one of the reasons, why I think that handymen own those quality tools, they use every day of their lives.

But when we change professions and enter office settings, the entire mindset appears to shift. How many of you, upon starting a new job, arrived at the office on your first day to be greeted not only by your new and friendly colleagues, but also by a black block of plastic, a full-size rubber dome keyboard with the standard QWERTY layout, and a USB mouse lacking thumb buttons? Typing on these layouts can be uncomfortable in the long term. In 1932, the Dvorak keyboard layout was created, which could easily be used with ANSI keyboard layouts. There are also numerous alternative ergonomic layouts for ISO keyboards. The search for an ergonomic physical keyboard layout is ongoing. Since 1972, there has been scientific evidence indicating that touch typing on traditional physical keyboards is slower and more uncomfortable. From what I have gathered, there have always been pioneers in the field working to develop ergonomic keyboards for everyone. With the ability to develop and print custom PCBs and keyboard cases, finding the perfect ergonomic keyboard has become a real possibility. This greatly expands the options available to find what works best for you as an individual, but it can also lead down a deep rabbit hole. And if we consider the fact that our brains are wired to utilize patterns we recognize, switching keyboards and layouts becomes a big hassle. Therefore, most people either do not know about other options because they are not exposed to them, or they use what they know due to other obstacles.

For me, this was definitely the case until a friend introduced me to Bone, an ergonomic ISO layout designed to replace the German QWERTZ layout. While he committed to learning Bone because he wasn't touch typing before, I stuck with QWERTZ because I was faster with it and couldn't spare the mental capacity to learn a new layout. This was about two years ago. But when I saw this presentation² about 5 months ago, explaining the long term issues with traditional keyboard layouts (and keyboards), I was hooked again and started crawling deeper into this seemingly endless rabbit hole. I researched ergonomic keyboard layouts and decided to stick with the Colemak-DH layout. I have always preferred the ANSI layout over the ISO layout, but all my laptops are equipped with ISO-Keyboards, so of course there are even technical hurdles to overcome.

Afterward, the dive into potential keyboards was not far away. I looked into split keyboards and stuck with the Corne, as it seemed the easier one to switch to (and it looks sick!), and actually build my first keyboard from scratch. But the build guide and more details into the used firmware will be something for another day.