I love mine, I built mine close to a year ago at this point, but it has really shined lately. I have a traditional KB for gaming still but all my typing is on this one. A second might be in order, but this one was built from spare parts, so will have to actually order stuff for another one. I just want to figure out getting a mouse on it like the linked one does. Then it would be perfect.
These keyboards look interesting but how does "space" work on it and how long did it take you to learn the non-qwerty parts of the layout (like space, hyphen, brackets, and tilde)?
Every single key is completely configurable, so you can have space wherever you want (or in multiple places).
That said, it's pretty normal to put it under directly under the thumb, on the side you normally use for space.
I use an ErgoDash, essentially a flat version of the Dactyl Manuform, and have this layout [1]. Enter is under my right thumb, but if I hold down that key it becomes Ctrl. I could already touch-type, but it took a week or two of average use to get used to all the changes. Basic typing was quicker, but touch-typing `, [], = and the function keys took longer.
Generally space in under the right thumb, backspace the left. I've seen some people swap this around, but for my brain there is no way to reckon with that.
I primarily use a dactyl day to day, but that's just a split version (with pretty much the exact same layout) as my kinesis advantage.
That said, I like to play the occasional videogame and the advantage and dactyl just don't work well for that. So I keep a 65% board around on my desk to swap out. It has a split spacebar, left bs, right space... which means in every game ever I just rebind 'jump' to backspace :)
For me, space is under the natural resting place of my right thumb. Enter on the left. And then the closer on each is backspace on right, delete on left. As well as layer toggling. It didn't take me too long to get used to the locations of most keys, but tweaked it over time. My weird one is I have `~ where caps lock would traditionally be. I use it a lot for code blocks in slack and things like that. And it really screws me up on another keyboard now where its not there. And then the bottom 4 on each hand, I really don't use much, volume toggles, win key and stuff like that. I need to figure out what else to do with them.
Two of my "bottom four" are Ctrl+PageUp/Ctrl+PgDown. That's previous/next tab in web browsers, my terminal, IDE etc, and really useful when keyboarding and when mousing.
As others have pointed out, it's fully programmable so you can have whatever layout you want.
That being said, it took me about 3-4 weeks to get used to the keyboard to the point where I wasn't frustrated all the time and about 2 months to get back to my regular typing speed. One big benefit - I was developing carpal tunnel and about 6 weeks after switching to the dactyl, all pain was gone.
Yeah I went from a kinesis advantage to a dactyl (printed a manuform shell, wasn't for me) and couldn't be happier. I'd been on the advantage for 20 years or so though.
Worth noting that there are many different possible shells on the manuform. A handful of pre-generated ones, and you can tweak the scripts to generate the exact curves you want. I just ended up with the 5x6 myself.
I'm already planning on order a second one for the office, assuming we ever return to it.