[geoah]

I love the idea of steno-like keyboards such as the gerkin, but I haven’t been able to go below 40 keys on a split keyboard myself without significantly changing my tools.

My main editor for example (vscode) heavily uses modifier based shortcuts and with less keys the overlap of modifiers and normal characters is too high and becomes confusing for me. I already have basic characters mapped to modifiers, ie click for tab, hold for ctrl and click for space, hold for layer2. Moving to chord based shortcuts might help but that means completely changing both my input and ways of working at the same time.

[alpaca128]

You don't need tiny keyboards for stenography, they just need n-key rollover and an ergonomic layout is a bonus. For me personally the sweet spot are 42 keys, much lower than that and I need to make a ton of compromises and the accuracy plummets. The problem is that putting modifier keys like Ctrl and Alt on normal letters is guaranteed to cause issues for certain key combinations unless you type really slowly.

And I don't know how flexible VS Code is in terms of keybindings, but I like to use Space as a leader key for many of my additions. So instead of e.g. Ctrl-x I press Space followed by x. It can be still just as fast with some muscle memory.