A Year with the Dygma Defy Keyboard

This post is a follow-up to the first impressions post I wrote about 9 months ago—rounded up to a year—on receiving the Dygma Defy, a high-end split ergonomic gaming keyboard. As a first-generation piece of computing hardware complete with beta firmware, there were some rough edges that the team had promised to improve in time. Thus, I think it’s worth revisiting this keyboard after this extensive period of use; plus, it’s a great excuse to nerd out on some of the finer details of mechanical keyboards.

I’ve kept the Defy as my daily driver for my primary Mac1. I was already building, and trying out, several different form factors and layouts to find a worthy successor to the solid, but aging, Kinesis Advantage2:

• A Kinesis Advantage360 Professional;
• A Split 65 Alice-layout keyboard, enclosed with a gorgeous wooden case;
• An ortholinear Preonic board;
• A Lulu lily58-style board;
• A couple of more regular 65% and 70% layout keyboards

For each of these keyboards, my routine would consist of flashing the most programmable firmware I could find for the device2, mapping out an approximate layout that’s light on layer customization but maintains some consistency and features across the boards, and spending at least a month getting acclimated with the device while iterating on the config. For the most part, I end up mixing and matching switches of all types and brands with whichever keycaps I have lying around. The combinations that I prefer—say, Gateron Oil King linears with DSA Milkshake Weirdo keycaps, or Gateron Box Pink linears outfitted with Alumizu aluminum keycaps3—I reinstall onto boards that I regularly use.

For the Defy, I went with a set of Novelkey Cream Clickies with GMK Blue Samurai keycaps, and the combination produces a cacophony of clicks when I type, like an orchestra of Snapple caps popping in synchrony. A big reason I’m keeping the Defy as my main keyboard is its giant thumb clusters: an additional 16 keys are accessible and reachable from both thumbs with minimal hand contortions. It sums up to a total of 70 keys available, which is a couple more than the common 65% keyboard layouts.

Here’s what my layout looks like:

I wouldn’t recommend this layout to anyone else; some of the strange key placements are from how the keys are laid out on the Advantage keyboards (e.g., breaking up the arrow keys), and everything for me is then remapped to Dvorak in MacOS, with some modifiers4further tweaked via Karabiner-Elements. It’s honestly a bit too much, and I’ve tried to simplify the arrangement over the years, but cognitive dissonance loses to pure muscle memory.

Because the keyboard layout already has so many keys available, I don’t find it necessary to customize additional layers; I added a couple of keys around controlling the LEDs and Bluetooth connectivity on another layer, but I use them so rarely that I forget which keys the functions are mapped to anyway. One additional thing I’m trying out, inspired by this YouTube review of the Defy, is adding hold functions to individual keys that output ⌘ + that key—e.g., holding R for 500ms invokes ⌘ + R, or a browser/window refresh. That said, I’m wary of too much customization with holds and superkeys, as I make too many mistakes at high typing speeds (100+ wpm, in bursts) with overloaded key functions5.

Tenting-wise, much of it comes down to individual preference, and I’ve seen some customizations—mounts on chairs, laptop-mounting solutions—that people have come up with to get their hardware in preferred positions relative to their wrists. The headline picture is a bit of an exaggeration; the Defy can tilt that high, but I find that position uncomfortable after a few minutes, especially since I make use of those wrist rests. Instead, I’ve kept the tilting angles low and instead apply a 15% negative tilt so the keys slope downwards, a configuration that I’ve preferred since the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard days.

Beyond my customizations, the keyboard itself has had a number of firmware updates since its launch. I’m disappointed to say that while the company is standing behind and supporting its products in the long run, the pace of improvement has slowed substantially since that initial flurry of activity; there hasn’t been a firmware update for the Defy for about half a year now. I did some wireless testing to see how the battery would hold up, and with low LED brightness, it can generally last upwards of a week before it needs charging. But, wireless connectivity with the Neuron is still a bit flakey, so I’m keeping the entire thing wired to my desktop; that said, even in wired mode, the Neuron still crashes once every couple of weeks on MacOS, and it needs to be unplugged and reinserted.

So, has the Dygma Defy keyboard been worth it?

Well, from the time that the Defy was initially announced through to today, there hasn’t been another keyboard built quite like this one. Ergonomic keyboards are already a niche category, and most vendors stick with either 3D-printed or plastic chassis; this keyboard is unique in the amount of detail paid to the build quality and materials used6. Something like the MoErgo Glove80 potentially has better ergonomics due to its concave keywells, but the overall construction puts it in line to compete with the Advantage360 more than the Defy.

The keyboard was and is priced at a premium compared to alternatives, but the broader context here is that the mechanical keyboard community has shrunk in the intervening timeframe. Much like mechanical watches, inflation and the post-post-COVID letdown have driven some of the interest out of the hobby, and there are just fewer new keyboards released now than 3–4 years ago. The Defy targets an unusual crossover—ergonomics with aesthetics—but it does an admirable job on both fronts.