Computer keyboards largely go unnoticed in daily life: most of us have to use them at some point or another, but they tend to be seen as interchangeable lumps of plastic and metal .
For some of us, however, what keyboard we use has an effect on our health. I have typed a lot, for well over 30 years. 25 years ago I had prolonged period of pain in my hands that was, in part, brought on by extensive keyboard usage. After 3 months of not typing at all, I resolved to do anything I could to lessen the chance of the problem recurring. I soon realised that traditional keyboards force our hands into an awkward diagonal posture that can cause problems over time.
Looking around for a solution – any solution, no matter how odd it might seem! – I alighted upon Maltron keyboards. I bought a PS/2 model, and then later a USB model, and those have been my main keyboards ever since. Nearly everyone who’s come to my office has taken one look at the large lump of grey plastic at the centre of my desk and asked “what is that?”:
Recently, after 19 years of very long service, my Maltron started developing cracks in its case (which you can see in the photo above if you look carefully). Despite the fact that it does look a bit flimsy, I’ve put more miles into that keyboard than any other keyboard owner I know. I can hardly complain that it’s eventually shown signs of wear, especially as I have a tendency to rest a chunk of my body weight on it when I’m thinking!
I took this as an opportunity to rethink my keyboard. What if, 25 years after I last investigated this, there was a superior option? I remembered someone who I respected waxing lyrical about the MoErgo Glove80 keyboard and, after some investigation of the alternatives, decided to take the plunge.
My first impressions of the Glove80 you can see above were positive. It is a nicely manufactured piece of kit that has clearly had effort and thought put into it. Even the keys feel nice! However, 3 weeks later, I have gone back to my Maltron. Because I only found one brief comment online comparing the two keyboards – Maltrons are a tiny niche within the broader niche of unusual keyboards – I thought it would be worth explaining my experience, because it seems to me that keyboard designers are missing out on superior designs.
What anyone who looks at a Glove80 or a Maltron will quickly notice – after they’ve got over the initial “that’s a weird keyboard” reaction – is that the keyboard is split into two. [In the Glove80’s case, this is very literal: it is two physically separate “half size” keyboards.] The keys are also not on the normal flat plane: they are laid out in the inside of a gently curving bowl. The Glove80 and Maltron have similar bowl shapes: not identical, but the differences are sufficiently minor that I found transferring between them to have little impact on my typing speed or accuracy.
Fewer people notice that splitting the keyboard like this makes possible a fundamental difference over traditional keyboards: one can put multiple keys under the thumb, what I will call a thumbpad . On a traditional keyboard, most of us will only use our thumbs for the Space bar and, perhaps, one or two keys either side of it. Let’s be generous and say that most of us can press 5 discrete keys between our two thumbs.
Each of my Maltron’s two thumb pads is a 3x3 grid of keys, one of which is double sized (i.e. 8 physical keys): my two thumbs can thus access 16 discrete keys:
The Glove80 puts a 3x2 grid (i.e. 6 physical keys) under each of my thumbs:
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