 I can never go back to using a standard keyboard again, not after using the ErgoDocs Easy for the last two years. I purchased the ErgoDocs about two years ago, and I've made at least two videos about the ErgoDocs Easy, about my experiences with it, and it has been my keyboard, the keyboard I use, for a full two years now, and I love it. For those of you not familiar with what the ErgoDocs is, it is one of these split keyboards, so you have essentially two keyboards, one for each hand. ErgoDocs is ortho-linear, meaning all the keys line up in straight lines, which is quite a bit different than your standard keyboard. The other thing about the ErgoDocs is it is a programmable keyboard, meaning, you know, you can rearrange the layout of the keys, and it's just a fantastic piece of hardware. I love the ErgoDocs. I could never go back to using a standard keyboard. But here in the last few weeks, I have noticed that the company behind ErgoDocs, which is ZSA, is now making a new split-key programmable keyboard called the Moonlander, and it looks really cool. One of the things I like about the Moonlander, just looking at the pictures, is it looks like it's going to be a little smaller than the ErgoDocs Easy, because the ErgoDocs did take up a lot of room on the desk. I mean, it takes up a lot of room on my desk right now. I'm looking at it, especially once you add the armrests, because I have the rubber armrest. Let me move my microphone out of the way here. I will show you, guys, all of this. You can see I barely have enough room to actually sit this keyboard in front of my monitors on the desk. And it actually is too big with the armrest to actually put in the little slide-out tray where most keyboards would sit. So I was hoping that the Moonlander would be a little smaller, and it looks like the Moonlander will be a little smaller than the ErgoDocs. So the Moonlander comes in at $365, and I purchased one last week, and it just got delivered to me, and it comes in this really nice, compact box. I'm actually surprised. This box, if you're looking at this box, let me switch to full-screen view here. This is not a very big box. How in the hell is there a keyboard in here? Right? So I haven't touched the box, I haven't unboxed anything. I'm going to take a look at my Moonlander for the very first time with you guys. So let me go ahead and unbox the Moonlander here. Now let's see what ships with it out of the box. So the first thing you'll notice is it is in a carrying case. It's got this neoprene carrying case, which is really neat because the ErgoDocs did not come in any kind of case. It wasn't really, I guess, meant to travel with you, where the Moonlander, I guess, because they've saved a little bit on size and weight fits really nicely in this compact neoprene carrying case. So you can take the keyboard with you wherever it is you go. The only other thing in the box is this little tool here, which allows you to change out the switches and the keys if you need to do so. So let me go ahead and get into the neoprene carrying case. And we have our power cable. And then we have one side of the split keyboard. And in the other side, of course, we have the other end of the split keyboard. And now that I've got the two split keyboards unwrapped, I noticed that we have a tilt on the thumb cluster with the Moonlander that we did not have with the ErgoDocs. That's pretty neat. And of course, you do have the armrest that can be folded away, depending on whether you want to use it. Probably most keyboard users wouldn't use the armrest. I actually like the armrest, though. So I'm going to go ahead and adjust the tilt rest here, the tilt arm to the setting that I like. I'm also going to play with the thumb cluster and get it at the correct angle for me. And there is a screw here. And I can, of course, tighten that up to make sure that that stays in place as I'm using it. Also, I'm going to go ahead and keep the armrest folded in right now, because I do want to see without the armrest, would it actually fit in the drawer here? And it actually would. It actually fits quite nicely. Now even without the big bulky rubber armrest for the ErgoDocs, the ErgoDocs, the keypads were still quite a bit bigger than the Moonlander keypads. And they just really didn't fit in this little slide-out drawer. You can see if I put the ErgoDocs, you know, one half of the ErgoDocs, and then I put the half of the Moonlander, well, you guys can't really see because I'm not directly above the keyboards. But they are, there's a noticeable size difference. It's slight, but it is noticeable. I can tell you there might be a slight weight difference as well. Certainly, if you're not dealing with the rubber armrest, there is a huge weight difference. Now I've got the Moonlander plugged up, and you can see the lights are working. Nothing on the keyboard is working, though. I don't think if I would actually accept any key inputs right now, no. I think what I need to do first is actually flash a keyboard layout to this thing, and if I go back to the ZSA website, the company that I bought the thing from, they have this tool called Oryx, and you see this is the Moonlander default layout, and it tells me what all the keys are. Now, I'm not going to use exactly the default layout. I'm going to keep it pretty stock, but there's a couple of things I want to change. The arrow keys. We have left, right on one hand, and then we have up, down on the other hand. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to change these. So we have left, down, up, right over here in the same order as HJKL, the VIM navigation keys. I want that to be exactly in the same order just below HJKL. So I'm going to move these arrow keys over here, and I'm probably going to put the square brackets where those arrows were. The other thing I'll do is I'm going to make sure that I have a super key right here, a command key, a windows key, whatever it is you want to call that. Other than that, I'm probably, I may play with these as well. I'm probably going to have a button here for layer one, a button here to change to layer two, because you do have different layers of the keyboard you can switch to. So you have different keyboard layouts. For example, if I wanted to do something with like a 10 key, you know, keypad, I switched to layer one here, and I have my keypad, right? Layer zero, of course, is the default layer. So I've got my layout set up. I named it. For those of you that want to check it out, you can go to the website. I think and look for my layout. I'm going to call mine distro to moonlander, qwerty dash VIM, because it's a qwerty layout, of course, and for VIM users, because I'm going to move these arrow keys into the correct order. I also went ahead and added page up and page down keys, because that was not in the default layout. And I actually use page up and page down a lot. Like those are keys I actually commonly use. I really don't need caps lock or home or print screen or any of the media keys or anything like that, but I do need page up and page down. So now that I've got my layout set up, all I need to do is download the layout. And then you use a tool called Wally to flash the firmware to your keyboard. And they have download links for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. And when you click on the Linux link, it just downloads an executable file directly to your computer. Make sure the thing is executable and then launch that. And you should have this program launch, which I just grabbed it here off camera. This is Wally, so I downloaded that executable. And it's asking me to select a bin file compatible with my board. The bin file is going to be the layout you saved from the Oryx configurator tool. So let me go back to my desktop. I'm going to choose select file. And there is the bin file that is from my layout. And it says press your keyboard's reset button. Now the reset button is going to be a little pinhole right here on the top left. At least I'm assuming that's it because that's the only hole on the keyboard. And then I have a little needle here. You need something very small to get in there. And then let me press that down and hold it for a second. Okay guys, I had to pause the video for a couple of hours because I actually did not flash this keyboard using ZSA's Wally program because for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to work on Arch Linux. They're pre-built executable that I got from the ErgoDocs website. It launches correctly, but it never recognizes that I'm resetting the keyboard. When I put the pin in, it never actually flashes anything. It's like it's stuck. There are two packages in the Arch user repository for the ZSA's Wally program. There's ZSA-Wally in the AUR and there's ZSA-Wally-Bin in the AUR. I tried to install both of them. They didn't want to build correctly. One of them launched, but all it was was a black screen. Nothing else happened. So there's something wrong with the graphical versions of Wally, but luckily I did a little digging around, looking for other people that also have a moon lander and run Arch Linux and how they were getting their things flashed, their firmware flashed, and somebody mentioned Wally-CLI. It's a command line program and it worked just fine. All I needed to do, let me get to my desktop, all I needed to do was to actually open a terminal and then run Wally-CLI and then the location of the bin file I downloaded from the Oryx configurator tool. And that's it. I just hit enter on that and that ran in about 10 seconds. It flashed the firmware. It didn't even ask me to do anything as far as the pinhole, trying to reset the keyboard. It just took care of it. I'm actually really happy that I discovered the Wally-CLI program because I'll probably just use the command line version of the tool anyway. It seemed much easier than the graphical version. Of course, the graphical version apparently is broken in Arch Linux right now. So I'm just warning you guys. Now getting back to the Moonlander. Now that I have flashed the firmware, typing stuff is pretty simple. So I can start typing and I can get some stuff. You guys, you know, here are the switches. Those are the kill copper switches. It's the same kill copper switches that I used in my ErgoDux. I did the same switches here. They are really light to the touch. They're not crazy light, but it's not very hard to actuate the keys with the kill coppers. If you're used to a standard keyboard, don't be surprised if you're mistyping a lot of things because it doesn't take much pressure to actually have those keys press. The other thing with the kill copper is their tactile. They obviously make noise, but they don't make that much noise. They're not that loud. I want a little noise. I want to be able to have that feedback that I'm actually typing. But I don't want it to be so clicky and so loud that it starts, you know, driving you nuts. You start hearing that clicking sound, just penetrating your brain. I don't want anything that loud. So the kill copper switches are perfect for me. Just using this keyboard for a couple of minutes, I can tell you some changes between this and the ErgoDux is the ErgoDux. Let me get a half of the ErgoDux back out so you guys can see the ErgoDux on the edges. The keys were double wide, right? They weren't the little keys like this. They were twice as wide as your standard keys. Well, that's not the case with the moonlander. The moonlander, that last row of keys on each side is still just a normal size square key. So where your typical, you know, control and shift and escape and all of those kinds of buttons are on the outside. That will take a little getting used to because on the ErgoDux I have plenty of room. I could just kind of throw my pinky anywhere and hit those keys. Now I've got to be a little more precise to hit those keys, but I don't mind because it does save on size a little bit. I also really like that they redesigned the thumb cluster to only include four keys on each thumb cluster instead of six keys, which was the case on the ErgoDux. Because honestly, six keys, your thumb only ever used these first two. Maybe that top one. So having six there, when really you're only probably ever going to use three on a regular basis because you just can't navigate your thumb between six keys, right? So I like that they paired that down to now you only have four keys on each thumb cluster. Because honestly, the very bottom keys on the thumb cluster, they're so far to reach, you're probably never going to use them. And if you're like me, what I was doing is I was just assigning keys to those particular spots that I knew I would never use, you know, the kinds of things you don't use like insert and print screen and things like that buttons you never even think about. That's what I was assigning those keys to. Overall, my first impressions of the Moonlander is I think I'm going to love it. It's just like the ErgoDux itself improved. It's got better ergonomics. It's a slimmer. It's lighter in weight. They remove some of the unnecessary keys and the thumb cluster. Now that I figured out how to get the firmware flashed here on Arch Linux, I think I'm going to be good. I love the neoprene carrying case that it comes with. The only thing that I haven't done yet, now that I've rearranged the key layouts using the oryx tool, one thing I haven't done is even though I changed the order of the arrow keys on the keyboard, I actually haven't switched the caps out. So it does come with a little tool. It's it's in the box. I need to actually remove those caps and rearrange those. I'll probably do that off camera, though. Before I go, I do need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Absi, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Arch 55, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Scott, Wes, and Willie. These guys, they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this unboxing of the ZSA Moonlander, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the distro tube channel is sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for distro tube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. Of course, the CLI works better than the GUI.