What is an Alice keyboard layout?

The columns nearest the middle, roughly where your index fingers rest, are physically separated and angled inward toward a gap in the center of the board, while the rest of the keys keep an ordinary staggered arrangement. The most visible sign of it is the spacebar, which is split into two unequal pieces rather than one long bar: a wider one for the right thumb and a narrower one for the left, each with its own modifier key beside it.

That is the whole shape. It is not a fully split keyboard in the sense of two separate halves you can angle, tent or set shoulder-width apart, the way a board like the ZSA Moonlander is; the gap sits inside one rigid board, a few centimetres wide rather than a chosen distance. Most Alice-style boards keep a familiar key set on top of that shape too, arrows and a small navigation cluster included, so the layout question is closer to "how are the columns arranged" than "how many keys are there," which is the question our own guide to keyboard sizes answers.

For your other thumb, in the first instance. The original board is documented with a 2.75u bar on the right and a 2.0u bar on the left, each with a 1.5u modifier beside it, and the plain reason for cutting one long bar in two is that either thumb gets a target it can reach without crossing the middle of the board. Out of the box that is usually all it is: the default keymap QMK ships for the open-source Arisu gives both positions the same Space, and split-spacebar boards are generally sold that way.

The second thing it can be is anything else a thumb can reach, and that only applies to a board whose keys you can reassign. On one running QMK or VIA, either half can be given a modifier, or the key that shifts the whole board onto another layer, which is where a second thumb key starts earning its space. What there is no standard for is what it should become: no convention says the left bar ought to be Backspace rather than a modifier. So if that extra thumb key is part of why you want the shape, check that the model in front of you can actually be remapped. On a board with a fixed layout, the second bar is a second spacebar and nothing else.

It is named after one specific keyboard, not after any older engineering tradition. Malaysian designer Yuk Tsi posted the interest check for the TGR Alice on the enthusiast forum Geekhack in April 2018, building its shape on an earlier design known as the EM.7. Deskthority's community wiki and Keyboards Expert's own account of the same history agree independently on the designer, the board and the year.

The original run was a small hobbyist group buy, priced well above an ordinary keyboard and hard to get even for someone willing to pay it. What actually put the shape within reach of a normal budget came later: a directly-orderable, fully assembled board that let a buyer skip the group-buy wait entirely, at a fraction of what the original hand-built runs cost. A later open-source variant called Arisu, published under the permissive MIT licence, became a common starting point for the community designs that came after it. Its designer worked from the same EM.7 and TGR Alice shapes, and because the files are open, other people have forked them into boards of their own.

Because a straight row of keys makes your hands bend sideways at the wrist to reach it squarely, and angling each half toward its own hand is meant to remove some of that bend. That is the manufacturers' own framing, not a measurement this site has made: MonsGeek describes the angled columns as being there "to reduce wrist strain and encourage natural hand positioning," and Akko frames the whole shape as an attempt to "make the keyboard shape adapt to the curvature of the wrist" rather than to force the wrist to adapt to the keyboard.

Both companies sell Alice-shaped boards, which does not make the claim false, but it does mean it is a sales pitch before it is a citation. What that pitch is actually resting on is worth checking rather than repeating.

Partly, and for a keyboard shaped quite differently from an Alice layout. The clearest study anyone points to is Cornell ergonomics professor Alan Hedge's 1999 typing-posture research, and Cornell's own account of it gives real, specific numbers: typists kept their wrists in the lowest-risk posture 71 percent of the time on the split board tested against 44 percent on a traditional one, and their wrists spent only 2 percent of the time in the highest-risk position, against 12 percent on the traditional board.

The keyboard Hedge tested was not an Alice layout. It was a fully split, vertically inclined prototype with padded arm supports, two separate halves set apart and tilted rather than one rigid board with an internal gap a few centimetres wide. That is a much bigger physical change than anything an Alice-shaped board makes, and none of the sources read for this piece measured a board shaped like Alice specifically. So the honest position is not "the research says Alice keyboards are ergonomic" and not "the research says they are not." It is that real research supports the general idea behind angling your hands apart, on a keyboard built to angle them much further apart than Alice does, and how much of that finding survives on a narrower, unibody shape is not something any study found for this piece actually measured.

If your hands are comfortable on an ordinary board and you are not looking to relearn where anything sits, there is no clean evidence here that you are giving anything up by skipping it. If the shape appeals to you regardless, or you are already curious about split and angled keyboards generally, an Alice-style board is a considerably smaller adjustment than a fully split one, without being the shape the strongest research actually tested.

Ready-made options exist now at a range of prices, not just as hobbyist group buys, including boards that skip mechanical switches entirely for an ordinary scissor mechanism. Two of our own buying guides, linked below, each cover a compact keyboard with this exact shape if you want the size and switch comparison rather than the layout history.