Split spacebars are surely the next big gaming keyboard trend

There are countless upgrades you could make to your gaming setup. A wireless this, a bigger that, a faster thing. But how do you know what’s going to be a genuine upgrade worth investing in? Personally, I think it might be split spacebars.

Hear me out.

A spacebar is greedy. Most keycaps are 1U. Or one unit, in relative terms. The bottom row of a keyboard is usually around 1.25U; one unit in size plus 25%. The right shift key is usually 2.75U. A spacebar is 6.25U. It’s over six times the size of a standard key. What a hog. All that real estate simply because you might give the key a nubbin’ with either left or right thumb.

Mess with your spacebar, mess with your entire key layout. While it’s often very easy to reprogramme your spacebar to do a different action via your keyboard’s software, it’s a lot harder to reprogramme your brain to hit any other key when you try to jump in game. Spacebar makes you jump. Everyone knows that; it’s practically etched onto your brain if you’re a long-time mouse and keyboard player.

So, why does a split spacebar help with that? It comes down to this: once you know which side of a spacebar you tend to thwack with your thumb, you can programme the other side to do whatever you want. I hit the right-side of my spacebar every time when I’m typing. Therefore, when I started using a Wooting 60HE v2 with a split spacebar, I set the left-side to be the delete key; the keyboard lacking a dedicated delete key for its 60% size.

Though for gaming, the split spacebar offers much more varied purpose. People do strange things with the WASD keys that I won’t litigate here, but I’m pretty sure most gamers use their left thumb to strike the spacebar for gaming. Right? Right. If you fall into this category, you have the option of using the right-side spacebar for things like a chunky melee key, or, my personal favourite, an in-game voice chat key.

You can do whatever you want, really. Those are two I find almost universally useful for the games that I play, though, of course, have something specific to a game—like counter in Deadlock to the right-hand side so you don’t keep forgetting about it—can be pretty useful. My point is, there are options, and you don’t really lose anything for having them. Plus, I don’t find it as unnatural to move to the spacebar as I do the dedicated macro keys you find on something like the Logitech G915 (or G915 X these days), which I still use all the time for my test bench.

In the case of the Wooting 60HE v2, the company has used the split spacebar wisely by inserting an extra programmable key slap-bang in the middle of the two halves. It’s a good move, as I’m yet to accidentally hit this middle key a single time while typing—further proving that part of the space to be a bit of a deadzone; wasted space, at least for my typing style. I’ve mostly stuck with this as an additional function key for now, as it’s more convenient on this mini board for accessing the arrow keys with one hand. Though it’s another programmable key within easy reach while gaming.

If you’re the type of person to care about how your gaming keyboard sounds, then good news. The lack of one unwieldly large spacebar means you get three smaller, more uniform sounding keys. That’s got to be worth something.

It does seem a bit obvious to split the spacebar in two, with or without the added middle key, so why haven’t we seen more of it?

First off, if you’re reading this from behind a keyboard with a split spacebar and wondering if I’ve been living under a rock for a couple decades; I know, split spacebars are not new. I’ve used a few keyboards with them in the past, often those which split apart down the middle and necessitating the split spacebar, though some that come with it simply for the love of the game (Keychron offers the very fuss-free Q15 Max). Some PCBs for custom builds also support the split. Nevertheless, it’s more of a thing for enthusiasts than the general gamer.

But that’s the point I’m making: why hasn’t this made the jump into more mainstream gaming keyboards yet? It feels like such an easy win.

Perhaps it’s down to adding more switches and stabilisers. For the 60HE v2 here, it adds an extra pair of stabs and two more switches compared to the single spacebar of the Wooting 80HE. Though that hardly feels like a dealbreaker when every major peripheral company now makes a keyboard with a screen on it somewhere. I’d much rather a split spacebar than a screen. There are cheaper options with split spacebars, like this Skyloong GK61 Pro, though I haven’t tried it out myself.

Keyboard manufacturers love a trend and I can see this one getting picked up in the next year or so. I’d be happy if it did, anyways. From the past couple of months using a split spacebar, I feel like it’s an upgrade worth considering when the time comes to replace your current gaming keyboard with another.