X-Bows very kindly sent me one of their ergonomic keyboards to try out. Quite a while ago actually, but I’ll get to that in a little while.
The X-Bows Lite Ergonomic keyboard is a 75 key wired (USB a to USB C) mechanical keyboard with a dynamic, customisable RGB backlight.
It comes with a choice of Gateron Blue, Red, Brown, Black, Yellow, Silent Red, and Silent Brown Switches.
What makes the X-Bows Nature unique is its layout, designed to optimise the typing experience by giving the user better wrist angles, and minimising the amount of finger travel. Basically, enabling experienced typists to work faster and reducing/avoiding carpal tunnel and RSI problems. The idea being that both hands stay in the same position all the time and that all keys are reachable from that position.
You have a central Ctrl, Shift, Backspace, and Enter nestled between two smaller spacebars, and (as you can see) the keys are different sizes and shapes than on a standard keyboard.
Now, although I type all day every day, I’m not a great typist. I peck away with my index fingers and thumbs most of the time and, as I discovered after using the X-Bows Nature for a couple of weeks, I use my right hand far more than my left. I cross over onto the left side of the keyboard with my right hand all the time. This meant that the X-Bows Nature took quite a bit of getting used to. I actually really liked the central keys and got used to them pretty quickly, but the real stumbling block for me was the outer Q, A, Z, O, and L keys, which tripped me up every time because of their size and position. I persevered, and there were things I really liked about it but after a couple of weeks, I realised that it was slowing me down too much with my day to day work.
Now, this is probably entirely my own fault; I saw a cool looking keyboard and wanted to try it out, but I’m not a proper, high-speed touch typist. I’m not the target audience. So, I decided to send the X-Bows Lite on to my good friend C. E. Murphy, who is.
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I’ve been using ergonomic keyboards since I first discovered them around 1999, with something resembling the Microsoft Natural Keyboard. For almost 20 years now, my favoured keyboard has been the Kinesis Evolution, an arm-mounted, fully split keyboard that tends to strike either fear or desire into the hearts of those whose eyes feast upon it.
I’m a touch typist with a roughly 130wpm typing speed for casual conversation, and broadly speaking, it only takes me a few minutes at most to adapt to a new keyboard, so I was really looking forward to trying the X-Bows Lite Ergonomic. That said, when I unboxed it and fit my hands to it, my gut feeling was that the keys were simply spaced too far apart for the size of my hands. In many ways, that gut feeling was correct. Even now, if I type very, very slowly, I can get my fingers on the right keys, but if I try to type at speed, the same thing happens as did in the first few minutes of trying it out, when someone asked how it was going and I replied:
“10 minutes in and i van seay with vonfidenve i have neber had this muvh diffivulty adaptimg to a key
oard”
There are aspects to it that I really like: the central enter and shift keys were terrific, and because of the stretch to reach the more typically placed shift keys, I found them easier to adapt to than other changes to the standard keyboard layout.
John mentioned above that he specifically had problems with the Q, A, Z, O, and L keys, which I find funny because my problems were M, N, B, V, C and X — most of the bottom row, basically. I was able to slowly determine that some of that is due to my own typing peculiarities: there are keys I use my index fingers for instead of the fingers you’re “supposed” to use for touch typing. I’d never met an ergonomic keyboard where that was really a problem before, but for the X-Bows, it actually became one. That, combined with the central “enter” key, ended up meaning that every time I tried to type at speed, I would (for example) hit the enter key instead of the B (as exemplified above — that “key (line break) oard” is the result of my natural stretch for the B which means I keep hitting the “enter” key…)
I had less trouble hitting the correct keys for the ones that John struggled with, but they were a much greater stretch for me, and less comfortable than even a standard keyboard. The ‘pinky finger’ keys were essentially too far apart from each other for my comfort even to just place my hands on, never mind type with.
The X-Bows has a great responsive feel, with satisfying key weight and sound, and I really, really wanted it to work for me. I genuinely think my hands aren’t big enough to settle on the keys the way the designers expected: it feels to me (a cis woman with medium-sized hands) like the keyboard was designed for large male hands… and possibly someone who doesn’t have to slow their natural typing speed down by 70% to hit the keys correctly.
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The X-Bows Lite Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard is $89 USD, available direct from X-Bows