My Experience with the ErgoDox EZ Mechanical Keyboard

Published: Dec 10, 2019

I spent a couple of weeks using the ErgoDox EZ but decided it was not for me.

• The ErgoDox EZ is a well-constructed keyboard.
• The company behind it provides top-notch support (even had the CEO on a thread or two).
• QMK is the real deal. (See, I do not want a keyboard without it.)
• Oryx is fantastic. Oryx is ErgoDox EZ's custom graphical (browser) tool for managing customizations (key mappings, layers, and colors). It is a night and day advantage over the crazy voodoo most other keyboards expect you to go through for customizations.
• The ortholinear layout was too big of a shift for my developer/keyboard short workflow. The deal-breaker was when I had to do some work directly on my MBP. The context switching between such different layouts was too much and not something I wanted to work through long term.

The experiment cost me some productivity and about $100. However, I learned quite a bit about what I value/want/need from a mechanical keyboard. It also led to a bit more exploration (hint: I bought and tried more keyboards), which I hope to share in a future post or two.