Wireless setup

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Wireless setup

  • Kinesis Advantage360 Professional
  • Kensington SlimBlade Pro

Modifications:

  • I remapped the Kinesis to Colemak layout, both in the firmware and by just swapping around the physical key caps. I do not necessarily mind the fact that the lighter home row keys are now out of place.
  • I used a tiny dab of hot glue on each half of the Kinesis to add tactile homing bumps
  • On the function layer of the Kinesis, I set the T, S, and R keys to left click, middle click, and right click (respectively). I do not use the buttons on the Kensington at all; I just make use of its trackball for pointing/scrolling, then click with the Kinesis
  • I tented the Kensington using a double magnetic ring phone stand. I also placed a sheet of scrap metal under the desk mat to help keep the magnetic stand in place

I tend to have a very pointer-heavy workflow, so it is important to me to have an efficient pointing solution. Because of that, I do prefer my Svalboard with its integrated trackballs situated just millimeters away. But this is a sufficient secondary setup that has the bonus of being wireless.

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Do the keycap profiles not bother you since moving them around?

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OP

I genuinely do not notice the small difference between the key caps! If I am thinking about it, yes, I can feel the difference between the the keys. But while actually typing, I can’t tell. I also had moved the keys around before I had ever used the keyboard, so I did not get used to the home row feeling different than the rest of the keys.

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I hate it. All of it. I hate that your brain can handle that and function. DAMNNN YOUUUUU

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OP

Does something here seem too complex?

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Ha- The whole thing. All of it. I love me a good mechanical and/or ergonomic keyboard but I still REQUIRE qwerty and trackballs are evil.

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I have a pointer heavy workload due to being forced to use Windows at work AND scrolling heavy workload due to me reading tons of technical data sheets and others people code every day. Typical mouse scroll wheels survive up to a year with me until they start skipping lines, gaming mouses up to two years. My last purchase was Logitech G502 which I selected deliberately due to it having heavy metal scroll wheel. So far it exceeded the two years mark :)

Do you maybe have some thoughts or tips that would help me better organize my setup? I am looking at buying Kinesis or Glove80, but that does nothing for my scrolling problem.

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OP
  1. I would love to hear from someone who uses a keyboard with an encoder for scrolling, because that seems like it would be the optimal hardware for scrolling. And any keyboard with an encoder is likely designed in such a way that it is relatively simple to replace the encoder if it eventually wears out at some point.
  2. I have had good experience with the Logitech T650 touchpad, which is likely able to put up with overuse. All you are doing is swiping your greasy fingers across the flat surface, so there are no moving parts to wear out. This handles pointing, scrolling, clicking, and other touch gestures that you would expect on a laptop touchpad. The biggest downside is that it uses micro USB for charging.
  3. I have seen reports that there is a way to use an Apple touchpad on Windows by extracting the Bootcamp drivers or something.
  4. There are keyboards with touchpads built-in, like the Bastard Keyboards Dilemma
  5. Something like a Ploopy Nano sounds like it would be a great option for a dedicated standalone scrolling device. It is small enough you can probably pair it with whatever keyboard/mouse you want.
  6. The Bastard Keyboards Charybdis has a concave keywell similar to that of the Kinesis Advantage or Glove80, plus a built-in trackball. Buying a prebuit, you have the option to put the trackball on either one of the two halves. But I have seen images of custom Charybdis builds with a trackball on both halves, which would be great for dedicating one to pointing and one to scrolling.
  7. If you get a keyboard with a single trackball, I think you should be able to configure it so that pressing or holding a certain key toggles the ball between pointing and scrolling. But your workflow sounds like it would likely benefit from separate dedicated pointing/scrolling devices.
  8. My overall suggestion is a Svalboard Lightly with dual trackballs. That is by far my favorite pointing/scrolling experience, with a very natural/intuitive feel. The main downsides are the price and the learning curve involved in adapting to that fairly unique key system. But if you can deal with that, there is a reason it is often called “the bottom of the ergo mech rabbit hole”.
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Thank you for your wisdom! :)

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OP

I just noticed Ploopy has a couple other relevant products:

  1. The Trackpad looks like a more modern version of the Logitech trackpad I mentioned above
  2. The Knob could be a decent dedicated scroll device
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You use the pointer between the keyboard? Doesn’t that cause trouble with the shoulders? I sprawl wide with my key board and wider with my trackball.

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OP

My goal here is to have the ball as close to my right thumb (my dominant hand) as possible, reducing how far I have to move my arm between the ball/keys. In practice, I have not noticed any shoulder issue, but I have also not used this setup for a long enough session that something like that would come up.

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Hm I may give that a try just to try something different. But I do have a mx Ergo so it’s not as accessible as yours.

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OP

If you could rotate the mouse 180° (so the charging port is facing you instead of facing away from you) and somehow remap the trackball to reverse it, the MX Ergo might actually even be better than my setup thanks to how much closer to the keys the ball would be. The SlimBlade is relatively wide, so I can only get its ball this close to the keyboard.

That “rotate the mouse” idea would not work if you need to use the mouse buttons like normal, unlike how I mentioned I use my keyboard as the mouse buttons.

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I like that double magnetic phone stand. I have the same one to use on my "writer deck" setup, which has actually ended up just as a super cheap travel laptop.

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