One of the most important pieces of kit in our arsenal is the keyboard. It’s easy to treat them as an afterthought but if you do a lot of typing as most of us do, the choice can mean the difference between efficiency or inefficiency and comfort or RSI.
The choice can seem daunting. There’s ergonomic keyboards with weird shapes, wireless keyboards, austere models with 87 keys and space-cadet-like models with lots of extra keys. If you’re an Emacs user you probably want function keys, a reasonably placed Ctrl key, an Alt or Meta key, and maybe even keys that can be mapped to Super and Hyper.
Xah Lee is a guy who takes all this more seriously than most. He’s spent huge amounts of time researching optimal key placements and ergonomic form factors for keyboards. He does this because he’s interested in typing efficiency and speeds but also because he does a lot of typing and wants to protect himself from RSI as much as he can.
Lee maintains a page about the Best Keyboards for Emacs. His recommendations are his opinion of course and others may reach different conclusions but, as I said, Lee has spent a lot of time thinking about the issue so his opinions are informed ones and well worth considering if you’re looking for a new keyboard. One thing for sure: you can almost certainly do better than whatever keyboard came with your system.