I will still recommend the UHKv2 board to folks for its unparalleled ability to automate the mouse, but I unfortunately can’t use it any more. Whenever my hands start using a row staggered board pain starts to find their way back into my wrists again and I have personally found that column staggered boards (especially those with a keywell) are the only real boards that help keep the pain away.
It is a bummer, since I did enjoy the board as well as this little community here, but figured that I should at least give this feedback to folks. The split design is great for shoulders, but it is not enough to keep the wrist pain at bay. If you ever made a board with a keywell I would be incredibly interested, but until then my wrists need to find refuge elsewhere.
My advise is to change layout. It will greatly change you finger movement which might cause your pain. No any keyboard can give you so much benefit as keyboard layout.
I don’t use them at all (neither left blue LCtrl and LShift). Just added for symmetry them. I have LCtrl/LShift/LAlt on top row (green buttons), the same for the right side.
Could you explain why you chose to create a columnar layout instead of a columnar + contoured design? Nothing against it, I am just curious.
Do you have thoughts on the Dactyl Manuform? I haven’t come across any companies producing anything quite like it. The closest might be the Advantage 360, but it seems to fall short in terms of thumb cluster ergonomics.
When my hands are in this thing, life is always good.
The non-keywell-but-columnar boards do feel much more comfortable. But if there is a pain spike these don’t make the pain go away, they merely are much better at preventing the pain than their row staggered counterparts.
The Advantage 360 seems like too expensive to me, given the Glove80. It is much more expensive and it seems to have worse software from what I can gather. Any representative from Kinesis is free to prove me wrong by sending a review device, but right now I am only willing to give that board a spin if there is a good deal for it on 2nd hand websites.
Oh, and there is a company called bastard keyboards that can build those manuforms for you. I am curious about the trackball, but am also pretty content with the current setup and … lets be honest … these keyboards are kind of expensive
@Vincent_D_Warmerdam Ah interesting, I didn’t know Bastard keyboards. You can also find some Dactyl manuforms on Etsy. I’ve been wondering for a while whether I should get one. I would like to try it out though before spending that money. So I’m still with my UHK for now (and still quite happy with it)
I second the transition to an alternate keyboard layout.
In combination with the home row mods (along with some additional custom QOL improvement I’ve made), these changes have been a game changer with the amount of hand strain I feel at the end of the day.
Personally, I tried Colemak-DH and did not feel that the benefits were worth the switch, then tried graphite, canary, sturdy, galium, ngram, and rstlne, and finally decided recurva was the best for me. I’d highly suggest recurva or graphite if you’re having hand pains. That issue comes from QWERTY. There has been plenty of documentation about its inefficiencies. You can find a lot of them on Alt Layout subreddit/discord. Let me know if you want and I can dig some up to share.
100% agree. QWERTY must die. It’s sooo bad. We shouldn’t let our kids use this.
I’m on Colemak, and I thought this is pretty much my end game. But I must admit, your Recurva looks very good too. I’m a bit hesitant though, mainly because Colemak is now available as a standard keyboard on many OSs (Linux, MacOS, Android…) which makes it much easier to have a consistent set up. I hop between external keyboards and Laptop built-in keyboards all the time, and I don’t want to loose my layout.
The other element that I found really enjoyable are home-row mods, and I got them to work consistently with some timing tweaks and “auto-mode”.
Just a quick reaction. I disagree that another layout is the solution and also do not think that a keywell or columnar keyboard is the holy grail, albeit those surely can be interesting and in some ways beneficial, but each of those come with disadvantages as well. Neither is the solution to get rid of pain I think (still can be considered in addition to posture changes, which likely are the real problem). Do you want to continue that discussion here or somewhere else? It is not really directly related to the UHK.
Solution is not the right word, but I would argue it is a remedy. And it also seems to be a remedy that works very well for me right now. The Glove80 also needed some editing to work well for me out of the box. Mainly homerow mods, which it does not come with.
I should stress though, I am very interested in columnar layout from UHK it it also adresses the mouse controller. This is an area where the glove totally falls short.
Absolutely a keyboard (like for you the Glove80) can help. That was not what I meant. But that you can also use a standard keyboard in an ergonomic way, especially a split one. Does not take away that the left upper row stagger is not beneficial to achieve an ergonomic posture, but it can be worked around to be “good enough” and not of an ergonomic concern in my experience.
On the other side also a keywell design will not guarantee that one gets painless. Especially the glove80 thumb position seems not optimal (too high), as several people have experienced in their usage, which can lead to new or additional problems – which surely do not affect everybody (also depending on existing problems one might have, hand size, keyboard position and posture, usage time…).
For sure a split (option) columnar (or possibly even better a symmetrical stagger, aka Tsuka60) UHK would be great!
You use the so called angle-mod, which I also use in my layout. But this does not fix the left shifted top row. Also the bottom row is shifted 0.5u key width, where it should only be shifted 0.25u keys.
