My first day with the Kinesis Freestyle
Thursday 09 April 2009 at 11:01 amAt the prompting of my friend Jay, and with a surprise refund from the Federal Government, Jay suggested it was time to upgrade my typing experience. I sit here, in front of my computer all day long, and sometimes all night long, doing what? Typing. Mousing, Using the computer. One would think that the three most important things are: chair, monitors, and input devices. Click read to read the rest.
I had a Logitech G15 for a while, the one with the orange LCD screen and backlit keys. It’s pretty cool, and it works on the Mac. But it is still a normal keyboard — straight, nothing special other than the LCD. I got the keyboard because I did a bunch of gaming and I had to use TeamSpeak2 or something to talk to the folks playing Team Fortress 2 over at Jiggly’s Fun House. When you type millions of keystrokes a week, it’s probably a good thing to have a really good and comfortable keyboard that’s all ergonomicky.
So I dropped $160 and got a Kinesis Freestyle Mac Keyboard. Split in two separate pieces. It’s weird. I think I’ll like it eventually, but I’ve had it since 4:30pm yesterday, and only used it for about 3 hours now (plus writing this). 
I’ve been using a regular keyboard for soooooo long using something ergonomic kind of makes my right wrist hurt, which is really the opposite of what I want to happen. I didn’t get it because I was getting carpal tunnel syndrome, nor because I was having any difficulties in typing — just wanting to try something new. I’ve got a 60 day return window with Kinesis should I decide that it isn’t for me, but I’m gonna put in at least 30-45 days to really try it out.
My initial impressions — well made, easy to type on, more quiet keyclicks than most of my other keyboards. The white color doesn’t bother me, though I would have preferred black. A few gripes that I may be able to work around.
First, the ESC key. I know why it was put way over there, but on every other keyboard in the world the ESC key is above the tilde. Not here — F1 is in the way. While I know it’s possible to remap the F1 to ESC on OSX, it looks complicated and I’m lazy. Jay says I’ll get used to the ESC key where it is… we’ll see.
Second, a feature that was touted as a good thing is the sticky FN key. With the FN key off, all the F-keys do their alternative action — Expose, volume control, etc. Well I got used to the F-keys doing what I wanted them to. F8-F12 were expose, and F1-F7 I just didn’t use. I can get that back, but I have to enable the FN key. When I do that, FN-ESC starts up Force Quit dialog, which screws me when I’m in VIM or something that requires using the ESC key.
Lastly there is no Expose key for showing the windows of the active application. I use this with relative frequency, and the fact that I have to hit FN F10 FN in order to get there drives me nuts.
I’m sure there are workarounds or configurations to fix this, and if you know them, sound off in the comments. I’m excited to try something new, but new things take time to get used to when they are different from what you are used to (that sounded redundant). Anyway, I’ll try to remember to post every few weeks about my thoughts. One thing is for certain: my right hand was used to typing the b. Oops.
two comments
Trackback link:
