this one uses a charachorder and has used it exclusively for years instead of using a keyboard. so why tell anyone else not to use it?

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a charachorder, for the uninitiated, is a full keyboard (and mouse) replacement. the main marketing feature is chording, which is the ability to specify programmed outputs when several keys are pressed simultaneously.

here's the thing: the charachorder (especially the CC2) is great to use. it has way better ergonomics than a standard keyboard. having a right pinky finger which broke and healed poorly makes it quite difficult to use a traditional keyboard, which has a ton of special characters relegated to that finger. nonetheless, it took less than 1 month to get up to 50 words per minute (wpm) using the CC1, and less than 6 months to get over 100wpm. it requires incredibly little actual hand movement to input any character a normal keyboard can, and with the ability to make single inputs correspond to entire phrases, the expressiveness of those small movement inputs is extremely high. using a charachorder feels like the hardware version of switching from microsoft word to neovim.

so why the holdup?

it's the company. big shocker, of course. in a few notes:

1. they have not open sourced CCOS. this is no surprise, since they want to make money, so hoarding IP is the default. they have previously stated that if the company ever goes under, they'll open source everything, but the words of a company are only so much.
2. they are a small team and manufacture everything in-house, which is... not great for production quality nor shipping times. speaking anecdotally from reading their discord on and off for the past 3+ years, charachorder's quality control is inconsistent at best. while they have a very solid return policy and this one has had parts replaced for free successfully under warranty with little hassle, it just isn't a good feeling to have to wait for months for their products to ship, only to have to then gamble on not having to send it back and wait again.
3. getting any product help requires being a member of their insufferable discord server with terrible moderation. also, their device manager allows users to message the discord server through a bot, and bots can't be blocked on discord. hopefully it's clear why this is an issue.

until these major issues are remedied in some way, recommending charachorder just doesn't seem to be an option.

alternatives

the svalboard exists and seems to be similarly capable to the charachorder. however, at a starting price of $800 for a pre-assembled unit and $330 for a kit for home 3d printing and assembly, the svalboard is a huge investment for little obvious benefit. it also doesn't have any builtin functionality for chording like the charachorder does, meaning it's less plug-and-play. that said, if the price were in a more reasonable range, it would be very easy to justify switching to the svalboard.

there is open source chording software available, such as plover which is designed to mimic stenography on a standard keyboard. however, there are two issues here:

1. chording is really not the feature of interest of the charachorder, despite it being the main marketing feature. speed is not the end goal, but a very nice side effect. the ergonomics of the charachorder is really what's important, and software like plover does not solve this problem.
2. plover is a piece of software, and not a plug-and-play device, which makes it harder to use machines which are not already configured. it's also a pretty big commitment to learn.

it is the unfortunate reality that those looking for the "ultimate keyboard replacement" are forced to either be locked into a company's unfree solution, or make serious compromises elsewhere. if the state of things changes, there will be another post about it, but until then, keyboard haters will continue to suffer.

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