Kinesis Advantage360 Professional Split Mechanical Keyboard

Product Information

I'm less concerned with the F keys but I'd miss the Esc key in the upper-left, and the printscrn and volume buttons. My last Kinesis Advantage 2 had the MX Red silents; I welcomed the change after switching to the Browns. I’m also not a huge fan of having to charge both sides individually although so far the battery life seems quite good.

As a general rule, tension is usually minimized overall by distributing work across as many muscles as possible that involve longer muscle trains, rather than localizing work in shorter areas. The Advantage360 feels like Kinesis' answer to the DIY Dactyl keyboard — which has a Kinesis-like layout, but which you would have to download, 3D-print, build and solder yourself.Knowing what I do now, I'd personally choose the keyboardio 100 over the kinesis 360, but I'm glad there is another flexible high quality split kb on the market. You connect a half, put it into bootloader mode by double pressing the reset switch with a paper clip, then drag your firmware file for the relevant half back onto it. The standard keycaps are fine and if you use QWERTY I’m not sure I would recommend switching to the blanks you can see above.

And, for now at least, while this board might not be perfect, if I was talking just hardware, this would probably take the crown as the best physical form for me.

Furthermore this is not a hotswap board, so you can use whichever switches you want, as long as they are Gateron browns.

The one strange design decision I found was hiding the hardware reset buttons on the circuit board itself, and the official documentation suggests either removing keycaps or angling a bobby pin in-between key crevices to hit 2 very tiny buttons—one for each side. Personally, I used the GUI to get a basic Colemak layout and then went to code to set more complicated stuff like auto-shift, and a few tap-dance keys that the GUI doesn’t support. You press a button on the underside and just lift it to the preferred height of the three possibilities. The MX Red silents were linear; there was zero tactility or feedback; it felt like you were pushing into the void and suddenly hit a wall.Now, I’m a Web Developer by trade, so Git is familiar to me and I got through all these shenanigans fairly easily but for a professional that isn’t a software developer, it’s just a whole lot of friction. If you often switch between devices, you will find the wireless software gets muddled fairly frequently.