Thoughts on the Glove80

Saturday, October 5, 2024

These are my impressions of the MoErgo Glove80 after using the Kinesis Advantage360 Pro for about a year and a half.

The Advantage360 Pro is a great keyboard, and I’m grateful to Kinesis for making a product that may have saved my career early on. However, the 360 Pro has some design flaws which are a bit unexpected from a keyboard with a nearly $500 price tag.

I find that the Glove80 solves every single one of these flaws with surgical precision. It’s also less expensive!

In short, I believe the Glove80 succeeds in a few primary design decisions:

Seriously, I am loving this keyboard.

I ended up ordering the Glove80 after getting frustrated with the bluetooth issues on the 360 Pro. A well-known issue with the 360 Pro is that the two halves will sometimes have trouble connecting. One morning, before work, it took me 10 minutes to connect the two halves. I remembered watching the Glove80 reviews from Ben Frain, If Coding Were Natural, and Code to the Moon - there was a way out! I went straight the MoErgo website and bought the Glove80.

Here are my impressions, which are primarly comparisons with the 360 Pro.

First impressions

First off - the bluetooth works flawlessly. Pull the keyboard out of the travel case, turn the two halves on, and start working. I feel like I shouldn’t even have to mention this, as it should be a given. However, this was not the case with the 360 Pro.

Also, yes, it comes with a travel case. This is nice because I take the keyboard to and from work. Kinesis does not have a travel case for the Advantage360 Pro, but I was able to make one using this case from Amazon. It’s great that MoErgo includes an official one.

Ergonomics

The Glove80 is incredibly comfortable to type on, which is important for an ergonomic keyboard! I find that the Glove80’s design around ergonomics makes much more sense to me than the 360’s design.

First of all, the Glove80 is low profile - it doesn’t sit very high on the desk. The 360 is quite thick, and I never understood how I was meant to work around this aspect of the design. Even when working at adjustable-height desks, I could never get my desk low enough so that the 360 would be at a comfortable height. When I did, my desk would be too low while I was using my mouse. The Glove80’s low profile solves this. Funny enough, this problem is actually directly referenced in some of MoErgo’s marketing material. This is what I mean when I say the Glove80 brings an attention to detail to many of the papercuts in design that I’ve seen in competing keyboards.

The Glove80’s thumb cluster is also much more usable than that of the 360. Out of the 6 keys allocated to the each thumb on the 360, I only found 2, maybe 3, usable by my thumbs while typing. The other keys are so far out of the way that I was never able to figure out their intended use. Are you meant to reach for them? Are they just extra keys tacked onto the thumb cluster? When I did use them, primarily as modifier keys, I’d have to contort my wrist at a weird angle to combo them with other keys. To be fair, I also had this problem on the Ergodox, on which I ended up flipping around a keycap on the bottom row for use as a third usable thumb key. The Glove80’s 6 thumb keys are all located in a place that is comfortable to reach from the thumb. Honestly, it’s one of the few thumb clusters I’ve seen that actually looks like it’s designed for a human thumb.

While most ergonomic keyboards use MX-style mechanical switches, the Glove80 uses choc switches, which are a low-profile mechanical switch. I wasn’t sure how I’d find this, but as soon as I used them, I was immediately on board. My Glove80 has the new Cherry Blossom switches, and it’s the smoothest typing experience I’ve ever felt. They’re extremely quiet, and while my younger self might have preferred the feedback of a heavy, loud switch (I used to type on ergo clears), I’ve come to appreciate light and silent switches. Lighter switches are much less fatiguing, and the quieter sound profile makes me feel more nimble on my fingers. This is the same feeling I got from using the Logitech MX Keys for a while. Maybe it’s my musical training - the low-profile silent switches almost feel like playing an instrument to me. I can train my fingers to move as efficiently as possible, moving no more than absolutely essential to hit each key.

Customizing the keyboard

I also find the Glove80’s solution to customizing the keyboard much better than the 360. The 360’s workflow is as follows:

The amount of technical knowledge required for this process isn’t great for most people, but I wasn’t too bothered by it. I get that Kinesis recommends only recommends this options for powerusers. However, I was bothered by waiting for 2 - 3 minutes for a build every time I made a change to my layout. I also wasn’t a fan of waiting 2 minutes just to see a build error from a typo or syntax error in my config.

I also didn’t find a lot of support or information from Kinesis on details around programming the keyboard. I was usually able to find what I needed from the ZMK docs, but not always. For example, some options in ZMK require the keyboard’s key positions, which I couldn’t find any information for (I ended up contributing this back to the repo after I figured it out). In general, the experience around the software with the 360 Pro still feels unfinished, especially given the price point - for a product like this, it’s not enough to just get the hardware right.

The Glove80 is much better this regard, and provides an online layout editor. Here’s the workflow:

While it’s not as nice as Oryx from ZSA, it’s pretty good for most quick changes, and most importantly, firmware builds quickly! There is also good documentation provided. Custom ZMK-level changes are also quite straightforward. I was able to move my homerow mod setup from my 360 config over within minutes.

Downsides?

When I was initially writing this, I was going to list the tenting mechanism as one of the pitfalls of the Glove80. The tenting mechanism is achieved with feet that can be unscrewed to adjust the height. This allows for a precise level of customization, but the mechanism can be tedious to screw and unscrew, especially when using the travel case often. A few points on this:

Because of this, I’m not even sure that I have any strong downsides of the Glove80 to mention.

Thanks to MoErgo for a making great keyboard!