I'm trying out a new keyboard: ZSA Voyager: https://www.zsa.io/voyager

It has 52 keys. I've never used a keyboard with so few keys before. The main difficulty: there's no dedicated row for Ctrl, Option, and Cmd keys (macOS terms).

But there are a couple of thumb keys on each side.

This created a tricky puzzle: should I put Ctrl, Option, and Cmd on a separate layer, or use the so-called "home row mode"? In home row mode, ctrl, option, and cmd are placed on regular letter keys and activated only when held down for some time, e.g. more than 200ms.

I've tried home row mode on other keyboards just out of curiosity. My experience was that visual feedback after pressing letters in “home row” becomes noticeably slower. Typing feels unpleasant, like it's lagging. Sometimes there are false positives too. People say you can fine-tune tap/hold timings to match your typing speed, but I don't believe in this approach (though I haven't tried it myself).

🙅 After several hours struggling with home row mode on ZSA Voyager today, I gave up again and dropped the idea of home row mode.

At the end of working day I've placed Ctrl and Option on a separate layer, with Cmd on the main layer (under my thumb). Let's see how it goes tomorrow.

Preliminary conclusion: 52 keys might be too few after all.

🔝 Currently, my top split keyboards ranking is:
1. Glove 80
2. Ergohaven HDP
3. Ergohaven K:03
4. ZSA Moonlander
5. Dygma Defy

We'll see where ZSA Voyager lands on this list.