Most keyboards are living fossils. While other hardware products have added features and increased efficiency, the average modern keyboard differs little from its typewriter-inspired ancestors of five decades ago. Nor do modern manufacturers seem much interested in anything more than token improvements. Yet in the past two decades, a small but growing group of open hardware manufacturers has emerged to fill the gap, developing open source firmware such as QMK and Kaleidoscope, and developing ergonomic hardware that can be customized to meet almost any need (you can find a list of ergonomic keyboard manufacturers at the end of this article). With an aging user base spending hours each day at the keyboard, ergonomic keyboards are rapidly coming into their own, but what should potential users look for? The features that make a keyboard ergonomic fall into three categories: The keys, the hardware shell, and the ability to customize layouts. A few features, such as wireless and Bluetooth, are just starting to become widely available (Figure 1), but these three categories are more or less standard. However, no keyboard that I have encountered has all the ergonomic features available, and how a feature is implemented may be important as well.

Figure 1: For now, Moergo is one of the few keyboard manufacturers that offers wireless and Bluetooth.

Just as importantly, buyers need to learn what to avoid. Today the word "ergonomic" is often no more than a marketing term, in the same way that "organic" sometimes may be. Manufacturers such as Microsoft and Logitech offer so-called ergonomic keyboards whose look imitates actual ergonomic keyboards, but which offer severely limited features – if any – such as a few programmable keys and lightly sculptured keycaps, of which the most that can be said is that they are a slight improvement over the chiclet keys on many laptops. The main concerns of such keyboards are features such as cushioned wrist rests, which are the least of ergonomic features and are not needed if you suspend your fingers over the keys like a touch typist does. In fact, some wrist rests can aggravate the repetitive stress injuries that ergonomic boards are supposed to prevent. Yet consumer guides to ergonomic keyboards often focus exclusively on such low-end products, ignoring the fact that they offer little more than a regular $20 keyboard for two or three times the price. For a keyboard that can accurately be called ergonomic, you can usually expect to pay $200 to $500. If that seems expensive, remember that video cards for gaming can be three or four times more expensive – and few of us can write them off as a business expense.

[...]