I spend a lot of time on the computer, both at my job and at home. That amount of time would, you'd hope, mean that I learned proper form for using a keyboard. Well, I can admit that it does not. While I can type fairly quick, I never really typed correctly (although I never fell into the pit of index finger typing that I see some people use).
Over time, this bad form led to a ganglion cyst on my wrist. At first, it wasn't a big deal, but repeated typing and bad wrist position led to the cyst growing larger and more painful. To try and help alleviate some of the issues, and to help fix the wrist positioning issue, I bought one of the Microsoft ergonomic keyboards.
While I liked this keyboard, I was also starting to fall back in love with computer gaming. This meant I went out and bought a mechanical keyboard. If you're like me, once you've used a mechanical board you aren't going back to mesh. This meant going back to a standard layout and having to deal with the wrist issues.
Fortunately, cysts come and go and I was fine for awhile (about a year), until it came back. At that point, I began researching mechanical, ergonomic keyboards. While I found some good options, such as the Kineses Advantage2 and Maltron, they just weren't quite what I was hoping for. The issue wasn't the price, it was that I felt the layout wasn't quite right for me as they were permanant layouts (as in, it was still one board). This led me to the keyboard this entire entry is about - the ErgoDox EZ.
This keyboard is an open source design, meaning you can buy everything needed to build your own, assuming you know how to solder, etc. In this case, I went with the ErgoDox EZ because they put it all together for me, and have some pretty good options for customization.
In my case, I went with Cherry MX Brown switches, as I love them for typing all day (and general use, as even my gaming keyboard runs brown switches). I also got the white coloring scheme, with the LEDs added and the tilt kit.
Initially, it was very weird to use as it is two halves that you can position however you want, which takes some time to get used to. For me, this took about two weeks, after I did some minor rebinding (they make this super easy to do), and some adjusting the tilt kit.
With that being done, it came time to learn how to retype properly. While I have never been an index finger typer like some people I know, I had never used proper form (as mentioned earlier), so when I first started using this it felt very foreign and was very confusing. This also led to some fatigue when typing as my fingers were not used to it. Good news though: this fatigue disappeared after a week.
Overall, I love this keyboard and am continuing to improve with it every day. I will post more entries in this series as time goes on, including what key rebinds I have made and links to those layouts, and I'll upload some pictures once I have time.