Buying the Kinesis Advantage 360 keyboard was a mistake

A developer shares their experience switching from Microsoft Sculpt to the Kinesis Advantage 360 ergonomic keyboard after 9 years. Despite the keyboard's reputation and ergonomic features (split layout, thumb clusters, orthogonal keys), it didn't work due to forced customization requirements, tall key shapes causing pinky strain, lack of tactile home row markers, and awkward arrow key placement that hindered code navigation. The orthogonal layout also degraded productivity on standard laptop keyboards. Increased mouse usage for tasks previously done with shortcuts ultimately led to abandoning the keyboard after 2 months. The author switched to Kinesis mWave, a Microsoft Sculpt clone with improved features like wired/wireless switching and customizable layouts.