Working as a developer, I spend quite some time in front of my keyboard. So after years of lurking and checking out keebs, I am finally typing these sentences on my first mechanical keyboard - a Mistel Barocco MD770 RGB BT Glaze Blue ANSI. I want to use this post to share some of my thoughts and experienc, to maybe help others along their path.

Layout:

• being from Europe, I am used to ISO layouts (ISO-DE to be precise). The reason I went for ANSI is the general availability of keebs and caps + the layout might be nice for developing. And so far I love it! Apart from the Umlauts, everything feels nicer to reach and within 1-2 weeks I managed to get somewhat used to it (for the Umlauts I use a custom MacOS layout, which makes them available via Alt combinations). Might never be as fast on normal german text, but spamming CTRL+Z with one hand already makes up for that.
• split is awesome! No regrets here, although it had me work on my touchtyping again!
• TKL is not a problem so far, although I don’t do much number stuff

Keyboard itself:

• love the clean look and everything feels pretty solid
• I am missing a tilt option. The keyboard comes with some feet you can screw on, but e.g. Keychron flip out feet look way nicer an easier to use
• wristrest is a must for me! The one on the photo was made by myself (and yes, I made it symetric on the first try. Couldn’t bear it, so I had to saw it apart and re-glue it)
• there is no extra B. Before then, I didn’t know that I was using the wrong hand to type it.

Software:

• no GUI/software for the computer. I am fine without, but would have been nice and easier to configure the board

All in all, I am happy to finally have made a move and I am looking forward to typing on the board every day. It is a very nice first keyboard to me, but looking at ortho layouts I am afraid it’s not the last.