That’s 5 minutes I’ll never get back
Thanks for the mention of n-key rollover. I wish I had known that term before now. I have an HP laptop that suffers from key ghosting when using the “Control+Shift+Tab” key combo, repeating the Tab key multiple times. Never could quite get their tech support to understand the problem and how annoying it is for tabbed web-browsing/other GUIs.
I love Scott Adams Blog. It’s often under rated - but I believe he is one of the more open minded thinkers out there.
I really wish one of these came with dedicated media keys, I don’t care if they are rubber dome to save cost. Nothing out there is really perfect.
My Perfect keyboard:
- Cherry MX Blue switches
- n-key Rollover
- No number keypad (87 key layout)
- 2 x USB ports
- dedicated media buttons, at least for volume
- Very minimal housing
As a fellow natural keyboard lover, I lament that none of these nice keyboard have the same shape that I’ve come to love. It looks like there are some nice split keyboards which I might try, but none like the (near perfect) MS Natural shape.
I only skimmed the comments, so apologies if someone already mentioned it… Unicomp will throw in a set of Mac keycaps if you ask for them (I think it was $10 extra). Now I get to work on my Mac with the old-school clacky keyboard, and the keycaps are correct.
I’m a die-hard Model-M fan, and I found the Unicomp was about 95% correct. The plastic is slightly different, feels a little lighter. The quality of the molding is slightly off. But overall - it beats the pants off any stock Dell, HP or no-name keyboard.
I just LOVE a keyboard with no printing whatsoever on the keys. I mean if you can touch type, why do you need printing on the keys?!
Plus you get that smug status when someone else tries to type on YOUR keyboard, hehhehe 
I have a good mechanical, and I love my tick tick tick, but if you want the rolls royce of the keyboards of all times, and if you’re willing to spend A LOT, then watch this: http://datamancer.net/
I don’t know if they’re good for programming, but they’re so damn beautiful!
(this is not spam!)
@David W
Your friends obviously have not tried Swipe on android. You will be surprised to learn that the current texting world record is held by an android phone the Samsung Galaxy S using Swipe and not by an iphone.
MS Natural Ergonomic 4000, all the way.
If you can’t type, you are not a developer, you’re not even a Power User.
Long live the model M. A space saver M and a logictech trackman are the one true path. 
My next keyboard will be a kinect hooked up to my PC and i’ll just do sign language
I’m another vote for the Apple aluminum keyboards.
I hate noisy keyboards (literally, a coworker with a buckling-switch keyboard made it impossible for me to work while he was typing rapidly).
I see no need for such extreme feedback, either; the Apple Keyboard provides more than enough, and more than enough travel.
Jeff: 150wpm? You do realise that makes you an insane outlier, right?
(And, Dvorak, people? That myth’s been busted, you know. Train as much for QWERTY and you’ll get equivalent results.)
I’d like to try this keyboard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0MEhKk9xg4
@Sigivald: It’s no myth; Dvorak is clearly a better layout. There are fast typists on Qwerty and Dvorak, but as a reasonably fast Qwerty typist, I made the switch and I can feel the difference, and my speed has improved. Barbara Blackburn holds the world record for touch typing, and she uses Dvorak. There are loads of websites out there with facts about the layout, but here’s a pretty good summary: http://workawesome.com/productivity/dvorak-keyboard-layout/.
I had forgotten why I did not like your blog. Unfortunally, it is very popular and Google shows it at the beggining of the search results.
The whole thing of typing speed is just ridiculous, and the pianist analogy is absurd. Obviously playing music is a total differente thing where TIMING actually matters.
I definitely would not hire someone who says dumb things like that and I am not coming back to read this blog.
Cheers
@Michael: Yes, it is a myth. I brought it up not because I’m ignorant about the “facts” about the Dvorak layout, but because I’ve done skeptical research on the subject.
See:
http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html (“The consistent finding in the ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak”)
That YOU personally prefer Dvorak, as well as the current record holder, suggests nothing at all; previous record holders did not use Dvorak, after all.
At the time, would that have “proven” that Dvorak was inferior, because “the record holder uses Sholes”?
If not, why not? If so, then isn’t the proof-by-record-holder-of-the-moment move invalid? (I maintain it is.)
I’ve never seen evidence that - with equal training - one or the other of the two is significantly superior to the other in ergonomics or speed that did not involve cherry-picking. If you cherry pick, you can “prove” that Dvorak is a lot better than QWERTY/Sholes. And if you cherry pick, you can “prove” the reverse.
None of the serious studies suggest enough benefit to either to be worth re-training - or that the “inherent” benefits of Dvorak are all that great. (See #2 link above; Dvorak himself didn’t know about every ergonomic issue involved, unsurprisingly.
Keyboards are an impediment to your work. Programming is thinking and creating, but, unfortunately, you need to get your ideas into the computer somehow.
I knew there was something special about those old IBM keyboards. I felt like they doubled my typing speed. Two problems with 'em, though: (1) loud and (2) not ergonomically shaped. If I don’t use a V-shaped keyboard, I start getting wrist problems.
I recently went down exactly the same path. I’ve had a number of MS Natural 4000s and got tired of the letters fading and the space bar sticking. After quite a lot of research on mechanical keyboards I’ve picked up a filco and haven’t looked back.