I found myself last week, as one does, aimlessly scrolling through the Keychron website when something caught my eye - an ortholinear keyboard that wouldn’t require me to sell a kidney. The board arrived earlier this week and I’m really impressed and surprised at how much nicer it is to use than a traditional keyboard.
The Rise of Mechanical Keyboards
Over the past decade or so, there’s been a resurgence in mechanical keyboards. These aren’t your standard IT closet fare - we’re talking real switches instead of those mushy rubber domes. Ever been on a call where someone starts typing and you think you’ve been transported to Omaha Beach? Yeah, that’s the sonic effect I’m talking about.
But they’re popular for a reason. They feel fantastic to type on, and given that most of us type words or numbers for a living, why not use a good tool for the job? I’ve been happily clacking away on a full-size WASD with Cherry MX Brown switches for years. It’s made by a small company out of California that was super fun to work with as I went overboard customizing the keys and overall design.
Discovering Ortholinear: A New Frontier
As happy as I’ve been with my WASD, I’ve always been curious about these bizarre keyboards that do away with the offset and place all the keys in a vertical grid. For years though, they’d either been something you needed to solder and assemble yourself (no time for that) or they were horrendously expensive for a thing I might end up hating.
But when Keychron announced their first ortholinear at a reasonable price, my curiosity finally got the better of me.
First Impressions: Form Meets Function
We have a couple of Keychron keyboards in the house with Gateron switches, so I figured this would have the same kind of lightweight feel. Boy, was I wrong. This thing is a beast - heavier than my WASD, heavier than my big Nikon with the zoom attached, and it might even give my Mac Studio a run for its money in a weightlifting contest.
But you know what? That heft adds up to a feeling of typing on granite, and it’s more welcome than you might think. It’s backlit too, which I appreciate as I continue to be confused about where certain symbol keys are in the dark.
Rethinking the Layout: The Ortholinear Advantage
The first thing you notice is that there’s no ten-key, no function row, and the spacebar looks like it’s been split in two. Weird, right? But it’s also way less of a big deal than you’d think.
Look closely - the whole thing is a giant ten-key. I’ve set my keyboard up so that if I double-tap one of the modifiers, the keys directly under my right hand turn into numbers. Function keys and media controls? They’re hiding under those satisfying mechanical knobs at the top.
And that split spacebar? Turns out it’s a game-changer. I’ve now set the left thumb key as backspace, and I love it. Even more than Esc, which I’ve had remapped to where Caps Lock is for most folks for years (#VIM), backspace gets used all the time, and it’s all the way over there on most keyboards.
Adapting to Change: The Learning Process
I did some reading, and there’s some consensus that it should take a person a couple of weeks to a couple of months to get used to the ortholinear layout. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found that to be a gross overstatement.
I found a website that helps you practice typing, but in a much smarter way than Mavis Beacon ever did. It starts out with easy letters but quickly adds letters that are harder to reach, identifying thresholds for you to cross before the words get harder.
My right hand, in part I think because of the ten-key muscle memory, was right at home. The left hand, however, was where the real adjustment happened. The biggest change was with my left index finger. On a standard keyboard, this finger is responsible for a lot of territory, stretching to hit keys like ‘R’, ‘F’, ‘V’, and even ‘4’ and ‘5’. On the ortholinear layout, it suddenly had less ground to cover and fewer keys to handle.
This redistribution of labor took some getting used to. The letters ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘V’ in particular required some retraining. They’re now straight down from their home row positions rather than diagonally offset, which felt strange at first. But with a little practice and just regular typing, it quickly became clear that this layout is more natural and more efficient.
The beauty of this layout is that once your fingers adapt, they have to travel less distance overall. It’s like your left hand is finally getting a break after years of overwork. After a few days, I found myself appreciating the reduced strain and increased accuracy, especially for those troublesome left-hand keys.
Unexpected Benefits: Speed, Accuracy, and Comfort
After just a couple of days, I’ve got no plans to plug the old board in for a while. My typing speed is up overall, and it feels substantially more accurate. The site I’ve been using for practice sessions is tracking my average above 60 words per minute, and I’ve done 30-second sprints where I hit 80 words per minute with 98% accuracy.
Reflections on a New Typing Experience
Muscle memory is a funny thing. It feels like it’s totally engrained, but your brain has more flexibility than you might think. If you ever played video games, you were fairly consistently learning new control schemes, to say nothing about the transition from something like an NES controller to a PS5 controller today. Almost all cameras are set up to have focus activate on a half shutter press, but once I learned back-button focus and felt how much more control and accuracy it provides, my muscle memory adjusted within hours.
So here I am, a convert to the church of ortholinear. It may look strange, it may feel odd at first, but for me, there’s no going back. Sometimes, embracing the weird can lead to unexpected improvements in our daily lives.