Incidentally the ergo board I have is a Moonlander. I absolutely love it and it helped with my hands being fatigued after typing a lot.

I do have an entirely homebrew alpha layout, but I am also a crazy person.

Oh right, I always forget about those. All I heard about them was positive, so that is a plus.

Since you don’t want anything fancy physical layout wise, I would think going with a big conventional brand might be your best bet for at least USB passthrough.

Personally I tend to lean Logitech amongst those.

Unless you really like the lightshow of RGB lighting or want the super high polling for some reason, you don’t need to go for a gaming series one either, which often have inflated pricing. It might even be easier to find a full size in the office lineup, because excel loves numpad for obvious reasons.

Since I went the totally ergo brained route I can’t recommend any specific model in that area, sorry.

I am sorry this isn’t the enlightening solution, but I am missing some info.

When you say standard ergonomic layout, what are you thinking of? Because that word and the 100% wish make me think of the old wavey looking Microsoft keyboard.

I personally can’t recall seeing USB passthrough on any of the ergonomic boards, and after a bit of looking into the standard I can very well understand why. I have literally never seen audio jack passthrough, not even on standard slab keyboards. So for both these features, why do you want them? If it is because your PC backside is awkward to access, maybe a cable can do the job too?

If you do have a budget besides „it will cost what it costs“, what is it?

As someone that was diehard num pad user and believed it is essential, I am now very happy with a Moonlander and num pad on a layer. Depending on how much you mix numbers and letters, that might not be for you though.

Personally I do reposition throughout the day, but that is personal preference.

It is more and issue on how you do the connections between parts so everything can speak with everything else.

My commercial split has a master half that I could use standalone, the other half needs that master to function though. I imagine that also applies on a scale and then you run into problems on how to do the matrix without compromising nkey-rollover.

Have you ever had a split keyboard before? I use a readily available one and the split does take getting used too.

Why do you want the pads? I work with layers for things like numpad and other specific keys and that works fine. I do come from full sized ISO, so I get why numpad is attractive, it does kinda negate part of the benefits of the split though.