Honest personal opinion from someone who appreciates the UHK 80.
I’m coming from a TKL keyboard (KBDfans Tiger Lite).
Regarding the right side of the keyboard, it took months, but it is still not 100% compared to where I was with a TKL keyboard. But I’m terrible with changing muscle memory.
What I did to help with getting used to:
- Remove the keys above the left and right arrow keys, they are anyways of no use to me and replace them with these things: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/uanivr/homemade_key_socket_covers_to_remove_unused_keys/
- Use the original keys for backspace, enter, ins, del and have a different set of keycaps (cherry profile) on the rest of the keyboard
Most of the pain (not too much and getting better) with the right side for me still:
- Small enter (used to ISO enter)
- Small backspace (sometimes accidentally hitting ins)
- Small shift (removing the keys mentioned above helped a lot)
Regarding the wrist rest.
As I have small hands I’m able to rest my full hand on them, so this is not an issue, but people on this forum complained that the wrist rest tends to be too small for them.
I honestly would love to try the keyboard without wrist rest as I like my hands sitting on the table and the UHK 80 is low enough to enable comfortable typing without a wrist rest when not tented. What could be an issue here is the thumb cluster.
If I switch to my TKL keyboard my impression is that I have a more free hand movement (without a wrist rest, my hands sitting on the table) compared to when they are sitting on the wrist rests of the UHK 80. It is just a more natural feel. When my hands are sitting on the wrist rests I tend to feel that they are less relaxed, I feel more tension.
But all in all I do not think there is a better keyboard out there, especially talking about row staggered split keyboards with a full 80% layout and this level of configuration capabilities.