- Kinesis Advantage360 Professional
- Kensington SlimBlade Pro
Modifications:
- I remapped the Kinesis to Colemak layout, both in the firmware and by just swapping around the physical key caps. I do not necessarily mind the fact that the lighter home row keys are now out of place.
- I used a tiny dab of hot glue on each half of the Kinesis to add tactile homing bumps
- On the function layer of the Kinesis, I set the
T,S, andRkeys toleft click,middle click, andright click(respectively). I do not use the buttons on the Kensington at all; I just make use of its trackball for pointing/scrolling, then click with the Kinesis - I tented the Kensington using a double magnetic ring phone stand. I also placed a sheet of scrap metal under the desk mat to help keep the magnetic stand in place
I tend to have a very pointer-heavy workflow, so it is important to me to have an efficient pointing solution. Because of that, I do prefer my Svalboard with its integrated trackballs situated just millimeters away. But this is a sufficient secondary setup that has the bonus of being wireless.
My goal here is to have the ball as close to my right thumb (my dominant hand) as possible, reducing how far I have to move my arm between the ball/keys. In practice, I have not noticed any shoulder issue, but I have also not used this setup for a long enough session that something like that would come up.
Hm I may give that a try just to try something different. But I do have a mx Ergo so it’s not as accessible as yours.
If you could rotate the mouse 180° (so the charging port is facing you instead of facing away from you) and somehow remap the trackball to reverse it, the MX Ergo might actually even be better than my setup thanks to how much closer to the keys the ball would be. The SlimBlade is relatively wide, so I can only get its ball this close to the keyboard.
That “rotate the mouse” idea would not work if you need to use the mouse buttons like normal, unlike how I mentioned I use my keyboard as the mouse buttons.