Glove80: One Month In

It’s been a month since I first plugged my Glove80 into Hedwig and started using it, so I thought it was time for a follow-up.

First things first: this keyboard is the most comfortable thing I’ve ever typed on, to the point that I cringe now when I place my fingers on a regular keyboard in the office. If I wasn’t a keyboard snob earlier with my Kinesis, I definitely am now.

It’s not just the ergonomics, which I will get to below. I didn’t realize how important the switches are. I thought I’d miss the clicky sound and feel of my old brown switches, and sometimes I do for a moment, but it’s only for a few seconds. A whole morning of typing in Emacs? Nah. The Cherry Blossom switches that come with this keyboard are a pleasure to work with. They’re not only silent, but also super easy to press. It’s like whispering to my keyboard instead of shouting at it.

The real reason I ended up with the Glove80 was my RSI, and I’m happy to say it’s gone. That’s probably why 90% of people buy a keyboard that looks “crazy” like this one in the first place. Having the two halves separate also makes my shoulders and arms feel better. The keyboard parts are very light, so rotating them a bit into a slight “V” to fit the natural angle of my arms and wrists is automatic as I move around a bit, especially when I stand at my desk. With the Kinesis, which is much heavier and bulkier, this was a whole thing, not to mention the cables that ended up tangling around my coffee cup in the morning. This is much better.

Another important factor is the keywells. My fingers fit into those as soon as I took the keyboard out of the box. I know the keywells aren’t specific to the Glove80, but it was the first time I experienced them, and it makes you wonder why they don’t exist on all keyboards. It also helps you find the right position instantly. The palm rests fit, the slight height differences in the wells tell your pinkies where they should go, the thumbs naturally extend to the thumb row… it all felt right the second I placed my hands on the Glove80, and a month later it’s jarring not to have this when I switch to another keyboard.

This brings me to the key positions and the columnar layout, which was (and still is, to an extent) the hardest part to get used to. For the most part, the regular keys for QWERTY typing work. The issue is more with the function keys in their factory settings and the conflict, in my case, with what Emacs wants me to use. I’m mostly used to the common shortcuts now, but my right hand still does most of the work with the left Ctrl, and I have to consciously force myself to use the right Ctrl key for keys on the left half (like x or s) and vice versa.

The main issue I have with the keyboard now is gaming. This keyboard isn’t meant for WASD (see the layout in the picture below), which is hard-coded into any gamer’s DNA. For now, I switch back to the Kinesis when I play any action games. I could probably just create another layer for gaming, shifting the keys to maybe RDFG, but that’s just weird. Besides, games are more in the keyboard shouting category than the whispering one.

Other small annoyances… let’s see.

The legs of this keyboard. They are essentially screws with pads (the “boot” of the leg), and even though I use the nuts and rubber rings that came with the keyboard — which do help — the screws still move a bit from time to time, which results in the keyboard being a bit wobbly. It doesn’t happen often, and it takes a few seconds to fix, but I feel like there needs to be a better solution. I like to use a high tented angle with my Glove80, which means that when I want to use the case to take the keyboard somewhere, I have to unscrew the two long legs — the ones under the thumb rows — so they fit in the case, and then screw them back in and tighten them, which means I’m avoiding taking it with me, which is a shame. Here’s what these look like up close:

Two more nitpicky things: switching back to the Kinesis is actually confusing now, which I didn’t expect. I now type worse on the Kinesis than I used to. Not exactly bad, when you think about it: the whole point was to move away from standard keyboards, but the world still runs on the old standard. I now expect to find common function keys under my thumbs (where they should be!), but they aren’t, and that leads to typos at work because I don’t take the keyboard with me as I mentioned above. I’m fine on my laptop keyboard though; I guess it’s different enough from the Glove80 that my hands register it as a whole different mode and don’t get confused.

The other tiny small thing is not the keyboard’s fault at all: hard drive password at boot on Linux. There’s no Bluetooth at boot (it’s locked behind the encryption if you encrypt your hard drive), so I need to physically plug it in with the USB. This is a tiny little thing, but I find that passwords in general are frozen in my finger memory, and I have to watch myself type them now to get them right. The solution here is probably using new passwords that will work with this keyboard — which in turn means I will have the reverse problem when I can’t use this keyboard.

All in all though, this keyboard is fantastic. A few more months, and I’m sure I’ll incorporate more tricks to help with some of the issues I described above. I’m glad I got it. It didn’t just resolve my RSI issues, but it’s also making me a better typist in general.

1. Xah’s fly keys for the Glove80 (he only has a Dvorak layout for it) inspire me to make some modifications. For example, Xah has a shift key that acts as shift when held down, but as tab when tapped. This works well because the shift key is meant to function when you hold it, and the tab key is for tapping.