Disclaimer: This is not a call to action or a set of rules that must be followed for every keyboard user. It’s intended to provide inspiration for those looking to fine-tune their keyboard layout or those who are just dipping their toes into custom keyboards.

To simplify the discussion, I'll refer to the normal staggered keyboard layout as "traditional" and I'll refer to the broad swath of ergonomic keyboards with either grid or columnar layouts as "ergonomic".

• Examples of traditional keyboards (click arrow to expand):
• Examples of ergonomic keyboards (click arrow to expand):

There are five main problems with the traditional layout

1. The thumb on both hands is relegated to one enormous key with a single function despite being the strongest digit.
2. Modifier keys are positioned so that the pinky is over-utilized to hold these keys, and holding combinations of these keys is incredibly awkward.
   1. The pinky is the weakest and most over-utilized finger, which causes strain over time.
3. Many keys are so far away from the home position that they require the entire arm to move in order to use the whole keyboard.
   1. Number and function rows, arrow and navigation keys, and numpad. This wastes time and causes hand/wrist/arm strain.
4. Row-staggered alphanumeric keys introduce ambiguity about which finger should be used to hit a key.
   1. The main offenders are the "B", "C", and "M" keys, but the "Y", "X", and "6" keys also give touch-typers trouble.
5. Lack of customization. Note that this is becoming less of a problem with wider adoption of QMK/VIA (custom keyboard firmware) in commercially-available keyboards.
   1. Do you want to put the Control key where Caps Lock normally lives? Too bad.

All of these problems can be solved with an ergonomic layout

This is just one of many ergonomic keyboard layouts. It’s called the Kyria, and has many features that lend themselves well to the illustration of concepts discussed below. More information can be found here and here.

1. Instead of relegating both thumbs to a single large key, an ergonomic layout places many highly-used keys within reach of each thumb.
2. The main modifiers can be placed in the thumb cluster. In the example above, both Control and Shift can be held by thumbs, and Alt & GUI (Windows/Command key) can be accessed easily with a pinky if required.
   1. There are other ways to handle combinations of modifiers that we may address later.
3. There are fewer keys on this kind of layout, so a given finger must never reach further than one row and column away from the home position.
4. The rows do not have any staggering, so the key/finger ambiguity is removed.
   1. For example, the "B" key should be unambiguously hit by the left index finger. It's not even possible to hit it with the right index finger on a split keyboard like the example above.