Why I switched to Split Keyboards (Corne & Totem)
My journey into ergonomic mechanical keyboards and why you should consider them.
As a Computer Science student, I spend 8-10 hours a day typing. Last year, I started feeling wrist pain, which led me down the rabbit hole of custom ergonomic keyboards.
I started with the Corne (CRKBD), a 40% split keyboard. The columnar stagger layout felt alien at first, but after two weeks of practice, I could never go back to a standard row-staggered board.
Recently, I've been experimenting with the Totem. It offers a slightly different thumb cluster placement that feels more natural for my hand size. Configuring ZMK firmware to customize layers has been a fun learning experience in itself.
If you are interested in building one, I recommend sourcing parts for a hand-wired build first to understand the matrix. It's cheaper and teaches you a lot about electronics.
Thanks for reading! Check out the source code on my Github.