Kinesis Advantage2

For the past year I have used a pair of Kinesis Advantage2 keyboards with my Linux workstation, which has far exceeded any previous typing experience since learning to touch type in 1988. I have used many keyboards over the past thirty years, including the majority of Kinesis ergonomic keyboard models starting in 1996. Here you can read a short review of the Kinesis Advantage2, followed by enough background context to weary all but the most die-hard keyboard enthusiasts. Let us begin!

The Kinesis Advantage2 is nearly perfect

The Kinesis Advantage2 ergonomic keyboard is the latest in a long line of Kinesis keyboards which use separated concave keywells to closely match the arcs our fingertips naturally travel when curling and uncurling our fingers. The keywells fit my (average-sized male) hands very well, and I am able to rest my palms on the padded palm rests and reach all but some of the function keys (which I almost never use) without moving my palms. I always type with my palms at least lightly contacting the palm rests, which reduces shoulder strain and provides additional reference points that aid in accuracy. A keyboard tray with tilt adjustment makes it possible to achieve optimal wrist angles without any unwanted pinching or stretching, and the keywell separation removes any need to twist the wrists.

For those who have never used a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard, one of the most concerning questions is how difficult the adjustment is to the thumb key clusters, and to a lesser degree the ortholinear keywell grids. I have to think back over twenty years to answer these questions, so some of the details are fuzzy, but in short, the thumb key clusters did take several weeks to adjust to, whereas the ortholinear keywell grids almost immediately felt superior. Within the first few days of use I was able to type numbers with higher confidence than ever before. You are likely to recover your productivity within a month, and to fall in love with the keyboard within three months.

For those who have used previous models, you probably want to know how reliable the electronics are. Later on I go into more detail on the problems with previous models, but suffice it to say that in my experience the Advantage2’s electronics have been flawless. I have not experienced a single typing glitch, nor have I had to modify or reprogram/restore the layout since initial setup over a year ago. Admittedly I do not make use of the more advanced programmability because my tools (vim, zsh, etc.) provide equivalent functionality. However, when I initially set up my pair of identical keyboards with slightly customized layouts, I configured one manually, saved the configuration file to my computer, then copied the configuration to the other keyboard. All of this functionality worked as advertised, and I expect much more advanced use cases would also work without issue.

Now it is time for full disclosure regarding one of the contributing factors to my keyboards’ awesomeness: I replaced the Cherry MX brown key switches with Gateron blue switches, which increases the tactile feedback, and makes the built-in electronic clicker unnecessary. Unfortunately, Kinesis does not sell keyboards with blue switches installed, possibly due to worry both about the market size and the potential for returns from people who consider the switches too noisy for an office environment. That said, Kinesis provides excellent support to people who are willing to spend the extra time and money to replace the factory-installed switches. I am not alone in having assembled custom replacements with Kinesis-specific parts purchased directly from Kinesis, and switches purchased elsewhere. Should you replace the key switches when you purchase a Kinesis Advantage2? Not unless you are already irrevocably enamoured with something other than Cherry MX brown or red switches, as I was due to an experiment with ErgoDox keyboards in 2016. Read more below about my experiences with other keyboards if your interest is piqued.

In summary, the Kinesis Advantage2 is an extremely good product, bordering on perfection for my own use case. If you type a lot and suffer discomfort while doing so, you should seriously evaluate this keyboard. If you still need convincing, read below about the details of my experience to see if any of your lingering doubts are allayed.

Typing pain, ergonomics, and adaptation

In 1996 I was in my last year of undergraduate computer science education, and I started suffering pretty severely from “emacs pinky”, as well as right shoulder pain from reaching for the mouse. The pinky pain was approaching disability levels, so I started looking hard for solutions. I vaguely remember encountering some alternatives like the DataHand (prohibitively expensive) and Maltron fully ergonomic keyboards (hard to purchase in the United States at the time). There were also some interesting user-implemented space bar hacks that allowed the left thumb to activate the control and/or meta keys, both of which are heavily utilized when editing with emacs. I chose to try the Kinesis keyboard because it appeared to be a good compromise between functionality and price.

Did the Kinesis keyboard help? Oh yes, very much. The emacs pinky pain went away completely, and no new pains replaced it. It took many months for complete healing though. Keep in mind that the left pinky is also heavily used to hold down the shift key. As for the shoulder pain, I didn’t really expect the keyboard to solve that problem, but it did help because the mouse can be placed closer than with a standard keyboard, which means a less strained reach. Over the years I have increasingly adopted a mouse-frugal work style, and no longer have any shoulder pain.

More details about typing ergonomics are in order here, because it takes some conscious effort to train yourself to type in a way that doesn’t cause undue strain. In particular, holding a modifier key and typing symbols simultaneously – “chording” – with the same hand forces uncomfortable hand contortions. I was fortunate to have been trained to use both shift keys so that chords are split between the hands, but similar discipline is important for the control and alt (meta, command, option, whatever) modifiers in the thumb clusters. I learned the importance of this as my hands complained about repeated chording while using emacs. It works quite well to simultaneously press the control and alt keys with one thumb, but it is important to split most other chords between the hands.

If you looked carefully at the image of my keyboard, you may have noticed that my shift keys are swapped with the keys one row down. I first made this change for the left hand over fifteen years ago due to discomfort from subtly twisting my wrist to reach the left shift key. I made the same change to the right hand in 2016 mainly for consistency reasons; I never experienced discomfort in my right wrist.

Unless you need to enter international characters, there is a redundant key to the left of the arrow keys on the left hand. As a vim user I find it convenient to remap this as an escape key, rather than typing control-[ (which is still a far superior alternative to reaching for the itty bitty escape key at the top left of the keyboard).

Qwerty, Dvorak, Qwerty, Dvorak…

The first Kinesis keyboard I purchased in 1996 was a “Kinesis Professional Qwerty/Dvorak” dual-legend model. If I remember correctly, only the professional model supported Dvorak at the time, due to flash/macro memory requirements not met by the less expensive model. I spent several afternoons after college classes getting used to the thumb clusters, and got over the hump without reverting to another keyboard. However, my short-lived attempts at switching to Dvorak were doomed because I was too busy to withstand the productivity loss during retraining. My first real chance at Dvorak came during my last week as a Sun Microsystems employee in 1998. All my work was done outside various minor administrative tasks, which left me with three or four entire workdays to intensively retrain. My typing was still rather slow when I started at my new job the following week, but as time went on, I regained my typing speed and left behind some irksome flaws, especially symmetry problems with mixing up ‘E’ versus ‘I’ and ‘P’ versus ‘Q’.

I did not use Qwerty again at all until 2001, when I started work at Apple on Mac OS X. In contrast to typical terminal environments of Unix-like operating systems, the common GUI hotkeys on Apple computers are configured for left hand chording while operating the mouse with the right hand. I tried the alternate keyboard layout that uses Dvorak when typing text, and Qwerty when holding the command key. Reintroducing Qwerty to my typing was highly disruptive, and after the first few days at Apple I decided to switch wholesale back to Qwerty. This retraining was disruptive, but my typing speed recovered much faster than during the Dvorak retraining. Interestingly, the symmetry problems I had with Qwerty typing prior to using Dvorak did not return, so my Qwerty accuracy improved as a side effect of the time using Dvorak.

Read further down about my experiences with ErgoDox keyboards to learn the unjustifiable reasons for my switch back to Dvorak at the end of 2016. Retraining to Dvorak the second time was nearly as much work as it was the first time, though some bits of Dvorak muscle memory lingered from the first time. I enjoy using Dvorak rather than Qwerty, but aside from being somewhat more comfortable to use (less impressive finger gymnastics), the advantages are marginal. I spent significant time with typing tutor programs in 2017, and came to the conclusion that my typing speed is primarily limited by cognitive factors rather than physical factors. My everyday typing speed tends to measure in the 70-90 words per minute range, and with extensive training I could perhaps sustain 110-120 words per minute. These speeds are well below the limits the Qwerty layout imposes.

Recall that the initial impetus for my exploration of ergonomic keyboards was emacs pinky. If you use emacs, you might wonder how well the Dvorak layout interacts as compared to Qwerty. In my experience, emacs key bindings work equally well (or poorly, depending on your perspective) with both layouts. emacs key bindings do not generally take into account physical key positions, so for example the motion keys (‘P’, ‘N’, ‘F’, and ‘B’) are only slightly less convenient with Dvorak due to ‘P’ and ‘N’ being on opposite hands, and ‘F’ and ‘B’ both being on the right forefinger. I switched from emacs to vim in 2004 due to more streamlined programmability for supporting experimental programming language syntax highlighting, so my first stint with Dvorak was as an emacs user, and the current stint is as a vim user. In my experience, vim is actually slightly better with the Dvorak layout than with Qwerty, primarily because the motion keys (‘H’, ‘J’, ‘K’, and ‘L’) are split across four fingers rather than three. Furthermore, the positions of those four keys feel pretty natural for their respective editing motions. The only common vim editing character that is perhaps in a worse location is ‘:’ (shifted ‘;’), but that is a small price to pay for the general advantages afforded by moving ‘;’ off the home row.

Glitches and failure

I purchased or was issued via employers roughly a dozen Kinesis ergonomic keyboards, from which I learned quite a bit about defects, flaws, and maintenance. One of the keyboards was part of a batch with defective key switches that had some sort of residual lubricant contamination; Kinesis handled this well from a support perspective. Several other keyboards failed earlier than necessary due to two contributing factors:

1. My cats spent many hours on my lap, shedding fur that was wicked into the key switches, apparently as a result of air displacement/replacement during key presses. After several keyboard failures I figured this out and stopped letting cats ruin my keyboards.
2. All Kinesis ergonomic keyboards prior to the Advantage2 had poor key debouncing. This made the keyboards especially sensitive to deteriorating key switch contacts, whether due to wear, dust, or… cat fur. In my experience, debouncing was especially poor for the ‘A’ key. I gave several of the keyboards to family members, so I didn’t churn through a dozen keyboards all on my own. Other mishaps also contributed, like being hit by a car while carrying one home on my bicycle, and kittens chewing through a cord. In one case I wore out an Advantage keyboard in a corporate office environment without a cat ever coming near it. That keyboard survived about four years of intense software development before key bounce became too severe for continued use. If I recall correctly, one of the first two keyboards I purchased (the one not involved in an auto/bicycle collision) lasted for about eight years, which is roughly equivalent to four years of full time use since I was pretty evenly splitting my typing between two Kinesis keyboards.

Unfortunately, there was another design flaw in the early models that persisted through all models prior to the Advantage2. The left shift key would sometimes get logically stuck “down”. This could be worked around by pressing and releasing the left shift key again, but of course this was quite disruptive because of the text that had JUST BEEN TYPED IN ALL CAPS. Not all users suffered from this glitch, but I experienced it on all models prior to the Advantage2. I suspect that triggering it required hitting a race condition while rapidly switching back and forth between chording with the right versus left shift keys. This is a good strain-reducing habit that not everyone practices.

When the USB model came along, a whole new level of stuck modifier glitchiness became the norm. These glitches involved combinations of stuck modifier keys (control, alt/option, and command?), and they were confusing enough that I resorted to resetting the keyboard by unplugging it and then plugging it back in. Such glitches were common enough that I learned to plug my keyboards into ports within easy reach, and I commonly reset the keyboard multiple times per day. I’ll be honest here: despite my love for the ergonomics of Kinesis keyboards, my frustration with these glitches drove me to start exploring alternatives, and the Advantage2 was barely in time to save me.

A few words on routine maintenance are perhaps worthwhile. Unless you use your keyboard in harsh environments (proximity to cats counts!), you can likely keep an Advantage2 keyboard in good working order for ten-plus years of heavy use without replacing key switches, as long as you clean it thoroughly once or twice per year. I do the following to keep my keyboards working well:

1. Remove all key caps with a key cap puller, scrub them with a toothbrush and Simple Green, and wipe them dry with a rag.
2. While the key caps are off the keyboard, use compressed air to blow out all accumulated dust and particulates. If any hair, fur, lint, etc. remains in or around the key switches, remove it with fingers or tweezers.
3. Remove the palm rest pads, and wipe down the entirety of the keyboard with a rag dampened with Simple Green.
4. Apply new palm rest pads.
5. Re-install the key caps.

In the future, as individual key switches fail, I plan to also disassemble, clean, refurbish, and if necessary replace them, now that I have an MX switch top removal tool.

Other keyboard experiences

One (clean) keyboard to rule them all

I have experimented with other keyboards for reasons including ergonomics, (Dvorak) key mapping, and switch technology. Following are brief summaries of some enlightening experiences.

• Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite: During the first of my two stints with the Dvorak keyboard layout, I sent a feature request email to PFU for Dvorak keyboard layout support. They later contacted me to test their pending product release, and I bought a keyboard at a discount from them in order to test the keyboard and provide feedback. The keyboard was very compact, and the lack of number key pad allowed the mouse to be quite close to the right hand’s normal typing position, much like with the Kinesis. It was also unusual in that it placed the control key where the caps lock key typically is. These attributes made the keyboard a nice low-configuration option for use on Unix-like systems. The rubber dome switches provided adequate tactile feedback. Overall I liked the keyboard, and I used it for years as the console keyboard for various FreeBSD development machines. The keyboard helped me recognize how nice it is to have the mouse close to the right hand, but it had typical ergonomic issues that kept it from being a serious contender for primary keyboard.
• Unicomp Model M: IBM is famous (or infamous if you can’t tolerate the noise) for its buckling spring keyboard switches, and there remain devotees who go to the trouble of keeping now-ancient Model M and Model F keyboards in service on modern development machines. I missed out on owning an IBM keyboard, but in 2006 I purchased a Unicomp Model M, which is substantially similar. I was primarily interested in the tactile feedback of the switches, since I knew in advance that the ergonomics would be otherwise unacceptable. The tactile feedback was indeed excellent, better than anything else I had thus far experienced, but to my surprise, I found the keyboard quite fatiguing due to the high activation force required (perhaps 75g for the buckling spring switch, as compared to 50g for the blue switches I currently use). My conclusion from this experiment was that if I were to build a custom keyboard, buckling spring switches would not be a realistic option, because completely custom key switch construction would be required to reduce the activation force.
• Maltron (cheap facsimile): Around 2006 I noticed that Maltron had apparently licensed a company in the Americas (in Brazil, perhaps?) to manufacture and sell Maltron ergonomic keyboards. These were clearly marketed as “budget” ergonomic keyboards, but the quality of the keyboard I purchased was so poor that I used it only briefly and eventually discarded it. I did benefit from the experience of physically interacting with the keyboard, even though the key switches were too unreliable to actually use for work and some of the keycaps bound up with each other. My general takeaway was that ignoring the substandard manufacturing, the Maltron had roughly equivalent ergonomics to the Kinesis. In theory, the extra keys on the Maltron are nice, but in practice, putting additional easily reachable keys on the Kinesis keyboard requires making the keyboard taller. That is a questionable trade-off, since the distance between the lap top and the keyboard surface is ergonomically important.

• ErgoDox EZ (Gateron blue): In late 2016 one of my brothers scored an epic nerd snipe by introducing me to the ErgoDox EZ keyboard. I was gearing up to completely replace the electronics and key switches in my Kinesis Advantage keyboards, and was unaware of the recent Advantage2 release. The ErgoDox EZ could be ordered with Gateron blue switches and “sculpted” (varying height/angle) blank keycaps, and it had a physical layout close enough to that of the Kinesis that I could probably make the transition with little retraining. I spent a lot of time with the ErgoDox over roughly two months. My first impression was that the Gateron blue switches felt amazing. My next less favorable impression was that the lack of keywells meant I couldn’t rest my palms and reach all the keys, and I had to adopt a floating hand typing style. I started futzing with keyboard layout using the excellent online configurator, and pushed the limits of what is possible without modifying the operating system’s keymap, given how modifiers and scan codes are actually transmitted. This is where the nerd snipe really came into its own: after experiencing such freedom of configuration, I couldn’t help being drawn back to the Dvorak layout, despite a fifteen year hiatus. Perhaps the most tantalizing major layout variation I tried was inspired by the Programmer Dvorak layout, the goal being to put all symbols on the primary layer to ease typing while programming. I put the numbers on a separate number keypad layer, much like what the Kinesis keypad layer provides, but I kept running into limitations that prevented reliable behavior. The end result of all these experiments was that I switched to Dvorak and moved both shift keys up one row. I never found a satisfactory alternate for the shift keys that avoided the pinkies. There was one bottom-row key on each hand that I could easily reach with my thumbs, but when I tried to use these as shift keys I discovered that hitting shift immediately after a space overloaded the right thumb. As an aside, palm keys or a foot pedal would perhaps work, but when I tried a foot pedal with my first Kinesis keyboard, I found it too restraining to always have my foot in contact with the pedal. My main lingering desire when switching back to the Kinesis keyboards was to move the tab key to a stronger finger, as was possible with the extra inner key columns on the ErgoDox.

  After all this, I discovered the Kinesis Advantage2, and never looked back. My brother now has my ErgoDox EZ keyboards, in addition to his original keyboard with Gateron brown switches and non-sculpted keycaps. He strongly prefers the sculpted keycaps, and he prefers the blue switches to the brown ones, but not enough to inflict the extra noise on his officemates. He really likes the true split keyboard, because it allows him to place his mouse between the two halves.

Possible Advantage2 improvements

Pre-Advantage2 models of the Kinesis ergonomic keyboards were maddeningly close to awesome, but their flaws were frustrating enough that over the past two decades I’ve spent a few thousand dollars and many weeks evaluating, designing, and prototyping replacement options. The Advantage2 has conclusively put an end to these frustrations, especially with blue switches installed. The Advantage2 is close enough to perfect that my only ongoing thought on the matter is to hope that Kinesis continues to manufacture an equivalent product for several decades to come. That said, there are a few things that could make the keyboards incrementally better for me.

• I would like to be able to purchase keyboards with blue switches installed, rather than going to considerable extra effort and expense to assemble replacement keywells and thumb clusters from parts. That said, given how well Kinesis supports motivated customers, the main issue is that I think blue switches are superior for a significant proportion of customers, but only a small minority will be willing to go to the amount of trouble currently required to experience such typing nirvana.
• As mentioned earlier, with blue switches, the electronic clicker is unnecessary, and I have it turned off. However, the top row (function keys) is a different kind of switch, and it would be nice to be able to enable the clicker just for the top row. For me this is of marginal value though, since I literally go months at a time without using the top row at all.
• The Advantage keyboards had a builtin USB hub, which was a convenient place to plug in the receiver for a Logitech Performance MX wireless mouse (distance between mouse and receiver is important). Similarly, I have at times attached a GlidePoint touchpad to the space between the keywells and plugged it in to the USB hub, mainly as a workaround for suboptimal desk setups that made reaching for the mouse difficult. However I am reluctant to ask for such a feature from Kinesis, given that the impending transition to USB-C or whatever comes next is ultimately more important to the product line, and a builtin hub makes such transitions harder, both electronically and physically.

A Kinesis Advantage2 resting in its natural habitat