Well, I'm in the market for a new keyboard again.Earlier this year I got a Matias Ergo Pro that seems like an improvement over the Kinesis Freestyle2, but it has this horrible problem that if you replace the connecting cable between the two halves of the keyboard with any cable longer than the 18" TRRS cable that comes with it, the left side of the keyboard starts malfunctioning randomly.
It's infuriating. I've tried cables from 4 different manufacturers, and built my own out of Cat5, and none of them work. I've exchanged quite a few emails with the manufacturer, and their responses ranged from, "Huh, that's funny" to "Why would you want a cable that long anyhow?" So, you know, not helping.
(Suspecting that it was maybe a USB power issue, I also tried plugging it directly into the Mac, and also into a powered hub of which it was the only member, which was itself plugged directly into the Mac. No perceptible change in the frequency of failures.)
So now out of frustration I'm back to the Kinesis, which feels just so mushy and awful now after the much better keyswitches in the Matias. But my characters show up without me having to power cycle it every few hours.
So I'm open to suggestions for any two-piece split keyboard where the halves can be placed 24" apart and still work. And that aren't mush. And that is an actual product for which someone will take my money, not vapor and dreams.
And speaking of USB....
Also recently -- possibly shortly after I upgraded to MacOS 10.11, but maybe unrelated to that, who can tell -- my mouse pointer began stuttering. Moving it slowly, sometimes it will suddenly warp to 200 pixels farther along in the direction of travel then resume normal speed. Tried a different mouse, same thing; tried direct USB connection, same thing.
Is it related to system load? Disk activity? Network activity? I can't tell, because the "Activity Monitor" program is a categorical piece of shit that simply stops updating as soon as anything of interest is happening anywhere, and likes to show "kernel_task" or "WindowServer" as the culprits for everything anyway, which is pretty unhelpful. I don't see anything particularly obvious in system.log, but that's an incredibly noisy cesspool, so who knows.
You know, when I first switched to MacOS from Linux, the fact that I was finally using an operating system that understood that tracking the mouse was the highest priority thing and that you could never, ever let that fall behind was one of the most refreshing things. I guess those days are gone.
