How I wasted $400 on a Keyboard

If you can already work effectively and comfortably on a normal keyboard, don’t waste your money on an ergonomic one.

In this post I talk about why I bought the ZSA Voyager, why I didn’t really like it, and why I ultimately returned to using a traditional QWERTY keyboard.

Why did I get a new keyboard?

I purchased an ergonomic keyboard for three reasons.

  1. Enjoyment: I enjoy typing on my laptop’s keyboard, and thought I would enjoy typing even more on a higher quality board.

  2. Comfort: I like programming and want to ensure that my hands stay healthy so that I can continue to write code for the rest of my life.

  3. Productivity: I hoped that an ergonomic keyboard would make me more productive.

I thought that an ergonomic keyboard would help me achieve these goals, but was wrong on all accounts:

  1. Displeasure: The learning curve for an ergonomic board is so ridiculously long that I began to hate typing. I thought that this feeling would go away if I just practiced more, but after several months of practice it didn’t.

  2. Pain: Despite trying to follow proper typing posture when using my new board, I ended up hurting myself in various ways.

  3. Inefficiency: My productivity tanked for months because typing was no longer second nature to me, and I was perpetually distracted from working on other tasks because I felt a constant need to practice typing.

I am going to explain all these points in more detail later on in this post, but first I’ll explain why I specifically chose to purchase the Voyager.

Why did I choose the Voyager?

I decided to buy the ZSA Voyager, and not one of the other high-end ergonomic keyboards out there (e.g., the Dygma Defy, the Kinesis Advantage 2, the Glove80), because it seemed to have the most consistently positive reviews online, and (this is going to sound immature) honestly looked the coolest to me. I had seen a bevy of YouTube videos lauding and magnifying the Voyager for its ergonomic design, sleek structure, and productivity-boosting customization options. On Reddit, people rave about the board and all its features. I even have a friend who owns this board, and he persuaded me to get it instead of the other options.

I’m now convinced that most people who praise the Voyager either:

  1. Actually suffer from the same problems I did, and tell themselves that they love the Voyager to cope with spending a colossal amount of money on it. I think this is the more likely option because people are usually reluctant to admit when they are wrong.

  2. Were not skilled typists to begin with, and the Voyager was the first board they learned to type properly on, and so typing on the board actually feels natural to them. I find this option unlikely because the Voyager is such an expensive and niche keyboard that I’d expect someone to be at least somewhat interested in keyboards and/or typing before buying one.

To explain why I feel this way, I’m going to share my journey with the board. Before I do that though, I think I should provide additional context by describing the board itself.

The Voyager

My ZSA Voyager

The Voyager, shown above, is a very unique keyboard. Here’s a list of its key features, starting with the ones that I actually liked (or could at least appreciate), and ending with the ones that I really didn’t care for.

Now on to my journey learning to use the Voyager, and why I eventually decided it just wasn’t for me.

The board arrives, and the struggle begins

I received and unboxed my Voyager in early January, and could immediately tell that learning how to use it was going to be difficult. I was prepared for this though, and began to practice doggedly in order to return to my former speed (around 90 WPM).

The main reason why it was so hard for me to learn to type on the Voyager is that I don’t strictly adhere to “proper” technique when touch typing with QWERTY. For one thing, I usually use my left pointer finger to press the C key instead of using my left middle finger. For another, I also often press the B key with my right pointer finger instead of my left (on a traditional row-staggered keyboard, this is just more comfortable). These quirks made it especially difficult for me to type on the Voyager, because its split design forced me to follow textbook touch typing technique.

The problem with learning to type with QWERTY “the right way” is that it makes it much more painfully obvious just how poor of a layout QWERTY is for typing (at least for English). It’s design is lopsided such that many more words can be typed using only the left hand than the right hand. The only vowel on the home row is the letter A, which means that in order to type most words, you need to move your fingers around the keyboard more to reach more vowels. Finally, some of the key placements are just strange (e.g., J, one of the least frequently-used English letters, gets a spot on the home row under the right pointer finger). These problems aren’t as salient on a non-split keyboard, since you can adapt your typing to accommodate some of these issues (e.g., you can make up for the lopsidedness by typing the B key with your right hand like I do). With a split keyboard, however, you just have to live with them.

I accidentally give myself RSI problems

So I started practicing typing each day on my new board for 30-60 minutes, and soon began suffering from symptoms of repetitive strain injury (RSI). My wrists, forearms, and elbows all hurt. It took me weeks to realize this, but it was because of how I was typing on my new board.

First of all, I began to suffer wrist pain that I had never felt before when typing on my laptop. This is because the Voyager comes with no palm rests, and unlike my laptop keyboard, isn’t low profile enough to prevent me needing to reach up with my palms in order to type on it. As I would later learn, reaching with one’s palms like this while typing is a sure way to injure one’s wrists. While I tried to avoid reaching like this by typing with my hands hovering above the keyboard (a technique recommended by ergonomists, and that programmers such as the Primagen claim to follow), this did not alleviate my wrist pain at all, and actually led to my next problem.

My elbows started hurting. I think the reason for this is because since I was hovering my hands above the keyboard to avoid wrist pain, I had to keep my arms bent at a 90-110 degree angle at all times in order to type. Again, I had seen ergonomists online (and in a book on RSI that my advisor had lent me) recommend this. This problem also went away once I stopped using the Voyager.

Finally, my forearms began to hurt. I still don’t know what exactly caused this pain, but it was worse in my right arm than in my left (I am right-handed), and ceased once I returned to using my laptop keyboard.

I give up once

By this point I had had the board for two months, and while I could type at about 90 WPM again (but definitely didn’t feel that fast), my new-found pain had not gone away. Since injury-prevention was one of the main reasons I got the Voyager in the first place, I decided to stop using the board so as to not risk injuring myself further. I had had the board for too long to return it though, so I instead boxed it up and placed it in my closet.

I still didn’t want to give up learning the board though, and its presence lingered in my mind.

I try again

Two weeks passed, and was still thinking about the Voyager. I couldn’t believe that the board could have been the cause of my injuries, and instead suspected that I was to blame. There are plenty of ways that I could have hurt myself that wouldn’t have been the board’s fault. Maybe I practiced too much and too hard. Or perhaps my being forced to touch type properly on QWERTY was causing me discomfort. Or I could have simply had poor posture.

So I decided to give the board another try. I resolved to do three things differently this time around:

  1. I would ditch QWERTY: QWERTY is actually a rather uncomfortable layout for typing, mostly because of its uneven and impractical distribution of commonly-used keys. So I opted to try a new, more efficient layout. After doing some research on the many popular keyboard layouts out there, I settled on learning Gallium. I chose to use Gallium for three reasons:

    1. Gallium has more commonly-used letters on the home-row than QWERTY does.
    2. Typing in Gallium involves typing fewer same finger bigrams than QWERTY. Same finger bigrams (SFBs) are pairs of adjacent letters in words that must be typed with the same finger in order to follow “proper” technique. For instance, try to type the word “decade” on QWERTY using proper touch typing technique. Each time you type the bigram “de”, you need to use your middle finger to press both keys. SFBs are uncomfortable to type, and QWERTY has many more of them than more modern layouts like Gallium do.
    3. I can easily configure my Voyager to use the Gallium layout. ZSA offers an online tool called Oryx for customizing one’s keyboard layout, and this made it easy to configure my board to use Gallium instead of QWERTY. This is in contrast to other modern layouts like Graphite, which require changing the shifted versions of some keys, a feature that Oryx does not support. While I could learn to use software like QMK to do this, I really prefer using a GUI interface to configure my board instead of modifying configuration files.

  2. I would focus on my posture: I would try harder to “hover” my hands over the keyboard, sit with my back straight, and keep my elbows at a 90 degree angle (or slightly obtuse even) without sticking them out to the side (something I was doing earlier).

  3. I would design my own symbol layer: Since the Voyager has so few keys compared to a standard QWERTY keyboard, in order to access extra keys such as symbols, one needs to create layers for their board. A layer is a separate keyboard configuration that one can activate by holding down or pressing another key. For example, on a standard keyboard, holding down the shift key enters a layer which replaces lowercase letters with their capital variants and numbers with symbols.

    I was previously using a symbol layer that a friend had designed for me, but was finding it not quite to my liking, so I decided that I would design my own. I started by doing some research on the topic of symbol layers, and stumbled upon this post by Pascal Getreuer, an applied mathematician at Google who sometimes writes about keyboards and keyboard layouts. I followed some of the advice in his post to design a symbol layer that I was happy with. You can check the layer out for yourself below.

    Notice how the delimiters (e.g., ‘[’ and ‘]’) and certain special characters like ‘>’ and ‘-‘ are adjacent to each other. This is to make certain common bigrams one types when programming, such as “()” and “->”, easier to type.

I was optimistic that all these improvements to my typing experience would make typing on the Voyager more enjoyable and less painful - and to a certain degree it did!

All is well?

I spent two months re-learning how to type with Gallium, and getting the hang of my snazzy new symbols layer. I used keybr to master each individual letter, monkeytype and ttyper to practice typing commonly-used words, speedtyper.dev to practice writing code, and finally Ngram Type to practice typing common fragments of words. By the end of the two months, I could type rather consistently at 70 WPM, and on monkeytype and ttyper I sometimes reached 90 or even 100 WPM.

I eventually began re-learning the keyboard shortcuts for my most commonly-used applications (Brave, Vim, Okular, VS Code), and while that was certainly not fun, after a week or so the muscle memory began to sink in.

So all seems well, right? Except there’s still a few problems.

I accept that it’s just not meant to be

With all these issues in mind, I decide that the Voyager and I are just incompatible, and put it back in its box. At least for now. I still have it in my closet, and maybe one day I’ll give it another go. Perhaps next time will be different, and I’ll be able to type on the board without pain. If not, I can always just sell it.

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