My right wrist started hurting. Nothing dramatic — the low, nagging kind that shows up when you spend all day on a keyboard and then drive a manual transmission home, working the same hand on the shifter. Some days it got real. It’s the kind of thing you ignore until you can’t, and I type for a living; my hands are the tools.
So I went looking for a keyboard that would stop doing that to me.
The hunt
I window-shopped for weeks — every ergonomic shape and split layout I could find, down some genuinely underground Reddit threads. What I landed on was the Corne: a 42-key split, three rows and three thumb keys per side. The reviews in those deep threads were great and — I’ll be honest — it looked hacker as hell. Sold.
The build was the easy part
The first one I built myself, and the build was a joy: switches, actuation weight, lubing every single one of them, keycaps, RGB, the whole nine yards. That part I’d recommend to anyone.
Then the part nobody warns you about — once you’ve built it, you have to learn to use it. A 42-key split with no number row and your fingers reassigned is not something you sit down and type on. I was unproductive for weeks. I fired up monkeytype every single day and stared at a WPM number that was, at first, genuinely humiliating. But it went up, and watching it climb was the only thing that kept me going. Monkeytype did more for me than any guide.
Where it stopped being configuration and started being engineering
Around 60–80 WPM the rabbit hole opened another level: home-row mods. The pitch is irresistible — your modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Cmd, Shift) live on the home row, held instead of tapped, so you never leave the resting position to hit a chord. The catch is that every home-row key now has two jobs, tap and hold, and getting the firmware to know which one you meant is the entire game.
On the Corne (running ZMK) I wrote custom hold-tap behaviors and tuned them until they felt right: a balanced flavor, a 200 ms tapping term, a 100 ms require-prior-idle so a fast rollover into a home-row key doesn’t accidentally fire a modifier — and the one that mattered most, hold-trigger-key-positions restricted to the opposite hand, so a mod only engages when the next key is across the board. Same-hand misfires — the exact thing that makes people rage-quit home-row mods — basically disappeared.
I gave the bottom row a second job too: tap z/x/c/v for the letter, hold for Cmd+Z/X/C/V — undo, cut, copy, paste, no chord. Hold T reopens the last closed tab. Small things, but they add up over a day.
A second board, then the ceiling
By then I was a fully-converted Corne evangelist. I gave my first board to my brother and built a second — far smoother the second time, with my config already living in a repo. But after a couple of months of daily use, the truth about hand-built boards with 3D-printed parts settled in: they have a ceiling. I wanted something that felt production-grade.
That’s the Voyager (ZSA). Roughly the Corne’s shape, with an extra top row and one fewer thumb key — one I never used anyway. I bought it, and started over: rebuild home-row mods and layers until it felt like my Corne. And I hit a wall — conditional layers just aren’t a thing in Oryx, ZSA’s graphical layout editor.
So I did what I do best: coding and troubleshooting. There’s a proven setup floating around that lets you build the firmware yourself — it merges your Oryx layout with hand-written QMK and compiles the .bin through GitHub Actions. I took that, added the features Oryx wouldn’t give me, and after a couple of days of testing had the layout exactly how I wanted it. My fingers were home again.
The fix
The quiet win of that approach: I didn’t have to abandon Oryx. I still edit the normal stuff in the GUI, the hand-written QMK rides alongside it, and CI builds both into one firmware. Then I added the trackpad add-on, so the mouse is gone too — less reaching, less travel, less of the exact motion that started all of this.
My wrist doesn’t bother me anymore. It cost me weeks of typing like a beginner, two keyboards (one now my brother’s), and a few nights hand-rolling firmware — and I’d do every bit of it again. The pain was the bug report. This was the fix.