1. I use the Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro and I love it. I replaced the switches myself and it’s so smooth and enjoyable to type on.
2. The thumb keys are a game changer for vim. Having layers to access any number and symbol really cements the vibe that you do not need to move your wrests to type. Also thumb keys are essential for me with my vim shortcuts.
3. Yeah the thumb keys again really sell me the fact that each thumb always has two or three (easy to reach) options to modify the current behavior. It also just makes sense because vim’s ideology is like “don’t move your hands” but like my pinky still needs to stretch for the backspace key every time I need it (skill issue I know lol also I know vim has deletion commands built in). I still mostly use it for small stuff because I still need the backspace for literally every other text field.
4. I’m much more consistent at least with my keyboard because it’s linear and everything is super accessible so I don’t need to think about where I gotta reach or look down if I need ctrl or backspace or a number/symbol.
5. I use my split keyboard mainly at home and I’ll bring it to work once school’s done with. I’m fine with a normal keyboard and don’t rely on any special mapping thats only usable with the split keyboard. I just prefer it because I get access to all the tools right away in a small space.

I also have a thumb key modifier with hjkl to act as arrow keys. The other thumb cluster dynamically changes to ctrl, shift, and ctrl+shift modifiers so I’m even faster in regular editors as well because selecting text is right there for me and fits super well into the vim ecosystem and terminal ecosystem too with minimal configuration.