I Switched to a Split Keyboard: Here's Why

11 minute read Published: 2025-01-21

I've ditched my traditional keyboard for a split keyboard. Here's why I made the switch and how I'm finding it so far.

Table of Contents

Why?

A few months ago I stumbled upon a YouTube video that would start off this whole chain of events.

This seriously is an amazing video and I recommmend giving it a watch. It's a great introduction to the world of custom keyboards and the rabbit hole that comes with it.

The Issues with the Standard QWERTY Keyboard

The main issues with the standard QWERTY keyboard can be summarized with the following:

Diagonal Columns

The keys on a standard QWERTY keyboard are arranged in diagonal columns. This is an artifact of the typewriter days when the keys were arranged in this way to prevent the jamming of the mechanical keys. This is no longer an issue with modern keyboards that use electrical switches, but the design stayed.

Aside: If you've spent time tinkering with Vim. you might have noticed that the Enter key is often called <CR> for "carriage return," which is another artifact of the typewriter days.

As a consequence of this holdover, keys like B are a huge stretch on modern keyboards, which makes proper touch typing difficult as you'll most likely need to take your hands off the home row to reach these keys or resort to using non-standard finger placements.

Modifier Keys Placement

The modifier keys (Ctrl, Option, Command, etc.) are placed in the corners of the board, making it nearly impossible to keep your fingers on the homerow while using them. This is especially frustrating for Vim users, as the Ctrl key is used in many keybindings as well as basic Vim built in commands like navigating up and down the page with Ctrl+U and Ctrl+D.

Hand Position and Ergonomics

Standard keyboards force our wrists and hands into unnatural positions that can lead to repetitive strain injuries (RSI) over time. The main issues include:

Ulnar Deviation: Our wrists are forced to bend outward to align with the keyboard
Wrist Extension: Many keyboards, especially non-mechanical ones, require lifting our wrists
Shoulder Tension: Hands are typically held closer together than shoulder width
Finger Stretching: Reaching for numbers and symbols often requires awkward stretches

A split keyboard addresses these issues by allowing each half to be positioned at shoulder width and angled to maintain neutral wrist position.

The Piantor

After watching quite a few YouTube videos and reading a lot of blog posts, I settled on the Piantor keyboard. The main reasons I chose this board were:

42 keys: This seemed like a good balance of portability and compactness with enough fumctionality overlap with a standard full-sized QWERTY keyboard that would make the board(s) super east to tae around and make it so that when I did need to use a full-sized keyboard, I wouldn't be completely lost.
wired: I wanted a wired keyboard to avoid the hassle of charging and from the research I did, it seems that wired keyboards are more reliable than wireless
great shop: Leo at BeeKeeb really is super helpful and responsive. The shop is only a two-man operation in Hong Kong, so it's nice to support a small business that does great work
pre-built: I briefly considered building my own keyboard, but I decided that I wanted to get a pre-built one to avoid the hassle of soldering and flashing firmware.

With that out of the way, I placed my order and waited for the board to arrive.

First Thoughts with the Board and Dialing It In

The Piantor keyboard. As you can see, it is a split keyboard with 42 keys.

The initial setup of any split keyboard requires patience. There's a significant learning curve, but the ergonomic benefits make it worthwhile. Here's my journey:

Initial Challenges

My preview WPM dropped to a snail's pace. The main challenges were:

Adapting to the columnar layout instead of staggered keys
Learning to use layers effectively
Training my thumbs to do more than just hit the spacebar
Getting comfortable with home row mods

Configuring the Keyboard with QMK

The most common firmware for custom keyboards are QMK and ZMK. QMK is the most popular firmware for custom wire keyboards, while ZMK is a newer firmware that supports wireless keyboards. Because I'm using a wired keyboard, I'll be using QMK.

Layers

The board comes with a default layer mapping, but I quickly realized that I would need to change it to fit how I work.

As I do a lot of work in the terminal, especially in Neovim and Tmux sessions, I wanted to prioritize the ESCAPE, Enter, Ctrl, and Option as I use these for tons of keymaps and navigating around.

The Base Layer: QWERTY + Thumb Keys

The base layer of the split keyboard. As you can see, it is mostly a standard QWERTY layout exceot for the home row mods and the thumb keys.

The base layer had the least amount of customization done. Ignore the TD keys for now, we'll go over those more in the section on home row mods. The main thing to see is that with the base layter, the keyboard is essentially a 42-key bord that you can use to type in QWERTY, plus the thumb keys.

The thumb keys are one of the most powerful aspects of this layout. Our thumbs are naturally strong and dexterous, yet on traditional keyboards, they' re relegated to just hitting the spacebar. On the Piantor, I've configured my thumb keys to handle space, enter, and layer switching - tasks that traditionally required awkward pinky stretches or hand movement.

The First Layer: Numbers and Symbols

The first layer of the split keyboard. This is where I am able to access my numbers and symbols.

This is where things start to get a little more spicy.

On my left hand, I have access to numbers, a period for writing floating point numnbers, and the Shift state of the normal number row.

On the right side, I have all of the symbols remaining from the board, with the top row being the rest of the Shift values of the normal number row and the rest of my symbols like (), {}, etc. This definitely took a lot of time to get used to, but soon muscle memory took over.

The Second Layer: Function Keys and Special Keys

The second layer of the split keyboard. This is where I am able to access my function keys and other special keys.

One of my favorite aspects of this layer is the arrow key placement. They map directly to the Vim movement keys (HJKL), which means I'm using the same spatial memory I've built up from Vim. This makes navigation incredibly smooth and intuitive - there's no cognitive overhead of learning new positions since they perfectly align with movements I already know.

Karabiner-Elemments: Making the Keyboard Work with macOS

I found that I needed to use Karabiner-Elements to retain some of the functionality that I had with my old keyboard. The main source of frustration was from the Mac media keys not working with the Piantor keyboard. I was able to fix this by simply just using Karabiner-Elements without any additional configuration, which I'm sure exactyly that fixed the issue, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My guess is that by default my Macbook is interpreting the media keys as function keys, so I just had to make sure that the media keys were being used instead of the function keys.

Home Row Mods: Making the Most Out of 42 keyboards

Returing to those TD keys, these refer to "tap dance" keys, which are keys that can be configured to do different things depending on how long you hold them down. In my case, I've configured them to be home row modifiers.

Home row mods are when you configure your homerow keyts to act as modifiers when held down. This is a great way to keep your fingers on the home row while still having access to all the modifier keys you need. I have found that I prefer this setup way more than the traditional modifier key placement and that I am looking to carry this over to my laptop keyboard as well.

There are many different layouts of the modifiers that are possible, however I settled on the following, which I believe gibves me a good balance of the keyt as a MacOS user who frequently uses all of these keys often in combination:

Left hand modifiers:

A: Ctrl when held
S: Alt when held
D: GUI (Command) when held
F: Shift when held

Right hand modifiers:

J: Shift when held
K: GUI (Command) when held
L: Alt when held
;: Ctrl when held

This setup provides several advantages:

Your fingers never leave the home row to access modifiers
The modifiers are symmetrically arranged, making them easier to remember
The strongest fingers (index and middle) control the most commonly used modifiers
Every modifier is accessible without any stretching or hand contortion

The learning curve for home row mods is steep - it took me about two weeks to stop accidentally triggering modifiers while typing normally. The key is to adjust the tapping term (how long you need to hold a key for it to register as a hold rather than a tap) to find your sweet spot. In my configuration, I've set this to 150ms, which provides a good balance between preventing accidental activations and maintaining quick access to the modifiers.

For a way better overview and explanatiohn of home row mods I highly recommend checking out this blog post by precondition.

Note: As an aside, while I think Karabiner-Elements is a great tool, I think that KMonad is a better tool for configuring home row mods on the default Mac laptop keyboard if you wanted your home row mods to carry over to the laptop keyboard as well.

Learning Tools: Retraining Muscle Memory

Switching to a split keyboard meant essentially relearning how to type. Here are the tools that helped me make the transition:

Keybr: This was invaluable for relearning proper touch typing. The adaptive algorithm helped me focus on problematic keys and gradually build up speed without developing bad habits.
MonkeyType: Once I had the basics down, MonkeyType helped me work on speed and accuracy. Its clean interface and variety of text options kept practice sessions engaging.
KeyCastr: This visual key display tool was crucial for debugging my typing. Being able to see my keystrokes in real-time helped me catch mistakes and verify I was using the correct keys, especially when working with different layers.

Tip: If you're making the switch, I recommend starting with Keybr to build proper fundamentals, then graduating to MonkeyType for speed training . Keep KeyCastr running initially to catch any layer or modifier key mistakes.

Conclusion: Is it Worth It?

It depends. If you're looking for a new hobby and are willing to spend a lot of time and the money on a keyboard, then I think it could potentially be a good choice.

Personally, I love the uniqueness of the board, the customization options, and overall the smoothness and tactility of the experience. Just from the short time that I have been using this board I've noticed:

My touch typing has significantly improved
Absolutely no wrist pain, which I would sometimes get from prolonged coding sessions in the past.
Much more enjoyable typing experience overall (some "shiny object syndrome" is definitely at play too here)
Rarely having to use my mouse anymore as I just began using keyboard shortcuts for everything such as navigating around my Brave browser, which has native keyboard navigation shortcuts like Space to page down, since all of my modifier keys are now so easily accessible from either my home row or thumbs.

Honestly, if you've already drank the Kool-Aid with Vim... this is just the next step on your journey to becomihng a keyboard gigachad, or an even bigger nerd.