My keyboard of choice for the last 10 years or so has been the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which I switched to after many years of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro.

I don’t love the Sculpt: its key travel isn’t fantastic, I don’t like the combination of the function keys and special-purpose keys (like volume controls) into one row of keys with a toggle, and the key labels tends to wear away pretty quickly with regular use.

But its ergonomics work well for me, I love the fact that the numeric keypad (which I seldom use, but keep handy when I need to do a lot of bookkeeping) is a separate device, leaving room on the immediate right for my mouse. And it’s still in production, relatively easy to pick up retail almost anywhere, and is reasonably priced (although I wish you could buy it without the companion mouse, which I never use looks like you can buy it separately from Amazon now: woohoo!).

My first Sculpt here in the Charlottetown office finally gave up the ghost today. The key labels, especially on the left side, were long-ago worn away, and the keys had been gradually more mushy for a while; the final straw was the right-hand side of the space bar giving up.

Fortunately I pre-planned, and had a backup Sculpt at the ready, upon which I type this very post.

It’s taking some getting used to, as the key travel is crisply new, and all the subtle modifications in hand behaviour I’d unknowingly been making in recent years to accommodate the decay of the old one are no longer needed.