Keyboards Should Have Been Like This

for a good while now I feel like I've had the perfect keyboard This is the mode 80 it's got milkshake key caps got the OG holy Panda switches love the way that it looks like the way it types love the way that it sounds but last January I saw this picture on Reddit and it looks so damn cool now that keyboard cannot be built anymore in the exact same way it was a very limited run but it was able to construct something similar so this here uses a plank Ortho kit from drop and the key caps are called doid I found them available on Amazon I'll link them down below but the thing you'll notice right away is number one these key caps well they're Legend lless so there's no like printing on them but they're also shaped like a strange legol like aesthetic which I think is really cool but also if you look at the layout it's like a perfect grid right straight horizontal rows and vertical columns and it's supposed to be very ergonomic like a very comfortable and efficient typing position but also this is a very small keyboard like this is a 48 key keyboard so it's like a 40% the smallest I've used prior to this was something like this this is a 60% keyboard so 61 keys this being significantly smaller it requires you to use layer shifts so in order to to access all the keys you have to go between layers to access all the stuff you would need on a keyboard but it looked awesome and I was like this is going to be great so I set up everything and I filmed myself using it for the first time and it was unbelievable and by by unbelievable I mean unbelievably bad I was typing at 20 words per minute and that was with me trying now normally when I type on a keyboard like a regular layout I'm like 90 maybe 100 words per minute I'm not crazy fast but fast enough right I type on a lot of different laptops a lot of different desktop keyboards give me a keyboard give me 5 minutes I can hit 90 words per minute on monkey type comfortably but with this Ortho thing this keyboard with awesome ergonomics I was at 20 so my first thought was like I can work on this this ain't a big deal I just got to spend a little time and just get com with it so over the next little bit I spent hours each day using this keyboard exclusively and it was hell because not only was I typing super slow everything had errors like my typing sucked video editing was slow and gaming was terrible like I was popping my ALT in the spawn room everything was just bad the whole typing experience was not great and it was entirely because I couldn't get used to that new layout and I thought maybe it's the keyboard like maybe it's the combination of the switches and the key caps that I chose that made this super difficult so I got more Ortho keyboards and I got this one in from board Source this thing is super Sleek it's wireless it's got such a nice layout it looks awesome already with Legends it looks even cleaner Legend lless and I just thought that this would somehow change the experience because it's a different typing profile but also orthol linear but the exact same problems it best SS like 50 60 words per minute on these things and the the conclusion that I drew at that point in time was like these are very beautiful looking keyboards but they're just not for me I just cannot get used to them now now at the time that I picked up this one from board Source my friend also picked up the same kind of keyboard but in a different color he got a black one that looked Ultra Clean with legend key caps and he had a wildly different experience from me he loved his keyboard he was able to hit his normal typing speed very quickly and we buted heads about this stuff but he said to me dude do not make a video about these keyboards until you can hit your regular typing speed like work on it until you can get to like 90 or 100 words per minute and then if you still hate the keyboard sure take a steaming dump on them but just don't make it because you just haven't gotten used to it so I was like okay I need to get faster on these things so the first thing I did was trying to put Legends onto these doy key caps I got some tape wrote some letters out put them on and it didn't work very well and then I tried using different colored key caps so to be able to identify where the alphas were supposed to be that also didn't work very well I even tried bringing the key caps from my old keyboard even though they're different height and that obviously didn't work and then I also tried even changing the way that I type by using my pinkies so another thing I didn't really cover is that I don't type normally like the proper way to type I never use my pinkies I just use the three fingers to type and my thumb for the space bar and I thought maybe if I learned how to type properly then I'd be able to hit my proper speeds on this thing none of it worked and I think ultimately the main reason I couldn't learn to type properly on these things or type fast on them was because I have 30 years 30 plus years of muscle memory just baked into how I type and to undo all of it was ridiculously hard especially at a highw per per minute and then last week on Friday I had this realization I've been typing pretty hard on this keyboard for months at this point sometimes like 2 hours a day and my wrist felt surprisingly fresh like normally when you type for a couple hours I don't have any kind of carpal tunel or anything but I feel tired like my wrists feel like they've been they've been used and I realized that moment that was the first time I kind of picked up on it and like this is what ergonomics is about this is why these ergonomic keyboards exist because you could type for hours and your wrists are in this like very neutral position They're Not Bent or crooked and your fingers don't have to move as much if you're typing properly and that's when I was like okay I get it now I get why these keyboards exist and there's this rocket fuel in me to be like I need to learn how to type on this thing so I committed to it and at this point I can comfortably hit 90 sometimes 95 WS per minute on this keyboard and after going through all of this I would say that I'm a firm believer that this layout the orthol linear layout is better than a regular keyboard layout now it's not for everyone like there's two big reasons why number one these Ortho keyboards are more expensive because they're not very popular not a lot of companies make them this one here is like one of the cheaper ones and it's already a hundred bucks for a Bare Bones kit so you got to get your own key caps and switches and then for a wireless version the one from board Source this thing starts at 130 bucks so it's definitely a step up in price the other thing to keep in mind and this I think is the bigger one it is a massive commitment to like put in the time to unlearn how how to type on a regular keyboard it is no joke you think it would be easy it is stupidly hard especially if you type fast on a regular layout but then you might be wondering wait a minute if orthol linear keyboards are better then why is it that like 99.9% of keyboards out there are those standard regular layouts and I looked into it it turns out it's actually a pretty weird reason the original keyboards came out when typewriters were invented like sometime in the late 1800s typewriters came out and that was the first kind of keyboard that people had to interact with and because of the way those typewriters worked those little levers that pop up and down they had to keep the keys staggered in terms of formation so they wouldn't come up and jam against each other those levers they had to keep the whole keyboard array staggered like that so that's the reason it's just that it's from so long ago now I think that if keyboards were invented today like imagine typewriters never existed and we just had computers and someone had to create a keyboard for them there's no way that we would come up with weird like staggered formations nowadays I think we've just had ortholinear keyboards right off the rip if you think about like stenographers Court stenographers who type super fast for living all of those keyboards are just like colner style like they're specialized keyboards with special keys but they're all arranged in colums kind of like orthol linear also if you think about like the number pads and stuff those are arranged in a grid right not staggered numbers because that's just the way that people type it's only because of typewriters that we still have that staggered layout I actually think it's weird that it's lasted as long as it has it it was literally like the late 1800s until now in 2024 but anyways that's my Ortho keyboard journey I hope this at least at the very least brought some attention to these types of keyboards for people that are interested in this type of stuff like if you type really frequently and you have like wrist injury risk I would totally consider one of these things like they're that's what they're for anyways hope you enjoyed this video

Channel: Dave2D

Views: 374,788

Keywords: Dave2D, Review, best keyboard, ortho keyboard, ortho

Id: DVfB_0s470I

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024