My keyboard journey lead me to the Dygma Raise 2

Nota: This post was supposed to be a review of the Dygma Raise 2 keyboard, but ended up being about my story with keyboard to arrive to the Dygma Raise 2… It is already way too long so I decided to stop there and I will write another post to do an actual review instead of writing a post too long to read :-). If you care only about the review, wait for the next post!

Before 2017, I didn’t care too much about keyboards. I was used to cheap 100% (with numeric pad) azerty keyboard or using the keyboard included with my laptop of the time. And even if I spent numerous hours using those, I wasn’t picky at all. I became fast enough with those and that was enough for me.

Using more and more laptop devices, I realized one thing though: keyboard with numeric pad were annoying because it was moving my mouse very far on the right as I must have the main area of the keyboard centered with the screen in front of me. I don’t know if it is some kind of OCD or just normal, but I can’t use a keyboard not well centered… With a 100% layout, the pad was already far right and then the mouse even more which was less confortable.

That’s why I added a rule for all my laptop: no laptop large enough to include a numeric pad. It would make the main keyboard area not centered and that was for me a show stopper. The mouse at the right of laptop was then perfect. The other show stopper for a keyboard was if the control key was not the bottom left one (some laptops have the “fn” key at the bottom left which breaks all my muscle memory shortcuts).

This started to make it less and less comfortable for me to use standard external keyboard, even though it is usually better when you have external screens plugged to a laptop. But I was still using cheap keyboard and was fine with it.

In 2017, I discovered kickstarter and the very first thing that picked my interest was a gaming analog mechanical keyboard: the wooting one. I’m linking the kickstarter campaign because they don’t show this keyboard on their site anymore. While not a big gamer, I decided to back them up because:

• I was looking for a 80% keyboard
• Heard so much nice things about mechanical keyboard I wanted to try
• While not a big gamer, I was playing starcraft II a lot back then and thought the analog part of it could help on other games if I decided to play more like I did years before (which I didn’t)

After some time (I don’t remember, but maybe around 4 or 5 months), I received my new keyboard and then my life changed! I fell instantly in love with the blue switches (you know, the ones with the very loud clicky noise :-)) as well as the 80% size.

After using it for a few months, every keyboard I tried suffered the comparison. I became a mechanical keyboard advocate and even bought one for the office but with brown switches (less noise for my colleagues, even though I prefered the blue) and another one for travel (a small 60% layout).

As I was also working more and more from home, I invested money in a more ergonomic setup at home. I bought a standing desk to avoid being seated all day, adjustable monitor support and secret lab chair.

Trying to always improve my setup, I was also reading about ergonomic keyboards. My first attempt at ergonomic keyboard was a TypeMatrix that I bought around 2011 as a bundle order with a colleague back then. But never managed to use it so I sold it later.

I was a little scared to try again those type of ergonomic keyboards because they are usually very expensive… But one day I yielded and purchased the ZSA Moonlander. It costed a lot of money but I was motivated to improve my setup. After its arrival, I spent hours configuring it and then tried to train daily using it at least 1 or 2 hours per day. I couldn’t switch entirely from day 1, because it was such a big change that my typing speed was really too slow to be my daily driver, specially during work hours. I couldn’t keep up for example in a meeting to write notes. Not even talking about all the typing mistakes, I was simply slow as hell. Typing a 3 minutes email was turning into a 15+ minutes exercise and I had too much to do to accept that. Hence the daily training.

But even with that good will, I didn’t manage to do the full switch… I tried with azerty and bepo, but no matter the amount of training, I always went to my wooting one. I gave up, put it in a drawer and moved on. Since then I tried multiple time to get it out of the drawer and train again or even forced myself again to use it. But I did not succeed. So I sold it not that long ago. I think the ortholinear layout was too complicated for my brain to change after so many years typing on those weirdly aligned keys.

I then tried a less extreme one last year: the Keychron V10. I used it for a couple of months but I didn’t like it as much as my wooting one… So even though it was supposed to be more ergonomic, I still switched back to my wooting one.

At that point, I decided to give up on those splitted and/or ergonomic keyboard. Ortholinear layout was breaking my typing flow and made my brain freeze too much. I already moved to an ergonomic mouse (story for another time) which fixed my right wrist pain anyway. I still had a small left wrist pain after extensive typing but that was light and rare enough for me to ignore it and keep things as they were.

It was until I stumbled in my feed reader on a blog post that I unfortunately can not find again (miniflux search is not great) that talked about the Dygma Raise 2. I was quickly intrigued as this is a split 60% keyboard but with a traditional layout, not an ortholinear one. I thought it could finally be the keyboard I was looking for. The split would allow me to finally have my hands in the alignment of my shoulders, while keeping a layout I was familiar with. A few additional keys but not much so it would still be familiar for my muscle memory while still allowing some great customization.

I hesitated a couple of weeks as it is yet again a very expensive keyboard but ended up buying it while thinking this would be my last try at a non traditional keyboard. And boy was I right to do so!

I bought it on the 16th of April and received it on the 25th of April. And I’ve been using 100% of the time since! Took a couple of hours to configure it exactly how I wanted and the transition was very easy! I realized that I was using the 6 and B keys with the wrong hand (right instead of left), but otherwise my muscle memory was not lost and my typing speed was 90% on day 1 and I believe I came back to my usual speed in a couple of days.

I’m even using it when traveling with just my laptop because it is that good that I don’t want to type on anything else at this stage!

As this post is now long enough, I’ll keep my review for my next post, but as you have already understood, it will be a very positive one :-).