I found my grail keyboard.

I am a huge fan of Microsoft’s ergonomic keyboards. I first owned the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, then the updated version of that keyboard, and finally the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop. I loved these keyboards with the best one in my opinion being the Sculpt as it gave the same ergonomics as the earlier keyboards but with a much smaller footprint.

Nevertheless these keyboards were not perfect and as much as I loved my Sculpt keyboard, it was flawed in a number of ways. First and foremost it was a membrane keyboard which didn’t give you the satisfying click that a mechanical keyboard does. Other flaws included a proprietary connector which seemed to hate anything but USB 2.0 ports and a making the top row of F keys and the ESC key much smaller and harder to press than other keys.

I tried mechanical keyboards over the years and loved the way the keys felt but in the end I always came back to the Sculpt, as flawed as it was it was still the perfect layout in my opinion. Many times I thought to myself: “if someone would make a keyboard that had the same shape as the Sculpt but that resolved some of these flaws, I would buy it in a heartbeat”, and that is exactly what I did a few weeks ago when I saw that Kenesis came out with their “MWave” keyboards. I bought it immediately.

If there is one word I can use to describe this keyboard it would be: perfection. The shape of the MWave is pretty much exactly the same as the Sculpt and I got used to typing on it very quickly. But beyond the shape, everything else about this keyboard is vastly superior to what Microsoft’s keyboards offered. First and foremost the keyboard was mechanical, giving the satisfying click that only a mechanical keyboard offers. Beyond that it offered proper F and Escape keys which was very welcome when using Vim and the connectors were vastly superior, offering Bluetooth if you want to use it wirelessly or USB-C if you prefer a wired connection.

One “flaw” I noticed right a way was the placement of the “End” key at the top right of the keyboard instead of the far right like on the Sculpt, leading me to accidentally pressing the “Delete” key. Though I quickly realized this wasn’t really a flaw because Kenesis shipped this keyboard with the open source ZMK Firmware and thus I could easily remap the keys to my liking, ZMK Studio (the key remapping app for the ZMK firmware) even offered a Linux app which was a very pleasant surprise.

Overall the Kenesis mWave is a dramatic improvement over the Microsoft Sculpt board and I can see myself chugging along with this board for years to come.