[kalessin]

I strongly recommend split hands, ortholinear layout and thumb clusters too, as well as a programmable firmware so you can setup your own layers.

[qudat]

I’ve been using corne (40% ortho split) for software development for over a year now. It is most definitely the way to go. Having common symbols ()<>{} be on a layer on the home row is so fantastic for typing speed.

[jokab]

3 months on Corne and Colemak. Dont attempt if you just started a new job, dont ask me how I know.

The only benefit for me is I started to appreciate keyboard macros (built in/QMK, or AHK), IDE custom snippets, and gaming mouse macros (navigation mainly eg: goto implementation/definition, booarks, etc).

It made me a slightly better dev because I now take advantage of these features

[alanbernstein]

That makes sense. I recently got a keyboard with configurable layers, but I'm using mostly standard qwerty to start out, adding custom bindings one at a time. I think I'll try out your suggestion, would you mind sharing more details of your configuration?

[onetimertwo]

Same, the corne (and generally 40s with layers) are great for programming.

I had to learn touch typing, but it was well invested time.

[schwartzworld]

Ortho makes sense if you touch type. I sort of hover above the keys using 3 digits on each hand to do most of the typing (with supplemental pinky usage, but never ring finger). It isn't Mavis Beacon approved, but I can bang out about 70wpms this way.

When I got an Ortho keyboard, I tried to learn to touch type, but it was quite slow. Eventually I learned to hover-type on that too. I love the look and sound, but not much more than that.

The biggest problem with using an ortholinear keyboard is that sometimes I want to just work on my laptop and for a while My typing speed on a regular qwerty keyboard slowed way down and had a lot more typos. Now I can mostly go back and forth.

[perrylaj]

This is my suggestion too. I had a Kinesis, switched to keyboardio and am really happy with it. There is a learning curve, and you feel quite unproductive at first, but you learn quickly and once comfortable, they are better than anything else I've tried.

edit: meant Kinesis

[phowat]

100% this, I have a zsa moonlander and it was one of the best purchases I ever made. The adaptation period was really frustrating, but I can’t see myself ever going back to a traditional keyboard.

[johnm]

Good entry point for people coming from the "traditional" keyboard world -- particularly those who don't expect to invest a lot of time in things like learning radically different layouts, heavy use & customization of layers, etc.