I've been wanting to buy a Kinesis for about 2 years now (can't find it in my country, expensive to buy and ship from overseas, among other things putting me off). I'm a heavy typist, mostly prose. Would you mind telling me your experience with it? How long have you had it, pros/cons, etc?
I consider the Kinesis to be the keyboard that saved my career. Terrible tendinitis set in during my last year of college in 1998. Keyboards were generally terrible, and I'd started using a Microsoft Natural, which is probably the worst keyboard ever made.
At my first job out of school, I'd drive my stickshift car home and nearly cry from the pain. It was really awful. I got into physical therapy, and started looking into better keyboard options. I tried the Kinesis Maxim first, since it wasn't too "weird". It was a big step up. I later tried the Classic (same style as the current Advantage) and never looked back.
Cons: horrible rubbery function keys.
Pros: literally everything else. The layout is, in my opinion, dramatically superior to the classic 104-key layout. It makes more use of your thumbs. It places the arrow keys where you can reach them without moving your hands from the home-row position.
I always keep a spare on hand and generally loan it out to friends and coworkers to try. I'd say there's been about a 50% adoption rate. Some people just can't get over the initial hump of learning how to use the thumb keys. The ones that buy a Kinesis are extremely happy with it.
By the way, the keyboards last for years. I've had a few keyswitches go bad (most likely due to my improper 'cleaning' attempts), but they can be replaced if you know how to use a soldering iron. Kinesis has even sent me several replacement keyswitches free of charge. They've got great customer service.
Good keyboards, chairs, and monitors are expensive, but in my opinion the interface between you and your computer deserves high priority on the expenditure list.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm planning on getting one by the next months, when a relative of mine will come visit from the U.S. Fortunately, I don't really use the function keys, maybe twice a week I'll hit one F-key that I mapped out to perform a calculation, but other than that, I have it all mapped out to the regular rows. I took typing in high school, so long ago that it was on an electric typewriter, meaning it had to f-keys - I think it was 1993. So I never memorized the f-keys, so I always got around to not using them. Just one more thing: do you have the regular keyboard, or the one with the linear key switches?
