The ZSA Voyager keyboard and Navigator trackball are for the tinkerers

Do you love to tinker with your keyboard layout? Do you love trackballs and think that one that attaches magnetically to your keyboard would be the coolest thing ever? Are you willing to completely blow up your setup in pursuit of possibly huge — or possibly marginal — gains in comfort or efficiency? Then I have a keyboard and trackball recommendation for you, with some caveats.

In early September, I started dabbling with ZSA’s Voyager keyboard and new Navigator trackball attachment. The Voyager is a low-profile, wired, split mechanical keyboard with 52 hot-swappable keys in a columnar-staggered layout. When you buy it, you can pick from one of four types of Kailh Choc v1 switches. The one shipped to me has Pro Red linear switches, which feel a little mushy in comparison to the Cherry MX Brown switches I’m used to. The Voyager has RGB lights, too, if you want to add a little color to your days.

The Voyager came out in 2023, but the interesting new thing is the Navigator trackball, which was announced in August. The trackball module snaps magnetically onto either the right or left half of your Voyager, just above the thumb cluster. (You pick which side at checkout.) The ball, which comes in a color that I might best describe as “trackball red,” feels really smooth to roll around. It’s nice having it right next to your typing fingers, because it means you barely have to move them from your keyboard.

ZSA says the Voyager is “designed with a laptop in mind,” and I can see why: the keyboard is small enough to toss in a bag if you want to bring your laptop somewhere but would prefer to type on a more custom setup. (It even comes with a carrying case.) If you want to ever-so-slightly tent the two sides, the keyboard comes with four little nubs that attach magnetically to the bottom. I mostly used the Voyager flat and was fine with it, though I would have preferred if the included nubs were able to tent the keyboard at a steeper angle like other ergonomic keyboards that I’ve used.

You can buy a tripod mount that lets you totally customize the tilt and pitch angle, or even mount the Voyager halves to your desk or the arms of your chair. But you can also make or buy other magnetic tenting accessories and attach them to the bottom of the keyboard yourself — you can even remove the magnets from the included nubs to use them in your own solution.

The real magic of the Voyager and Navigator, as with ZSA’s Moonlander keyboard that I reviewed in 2021, is how much you can customize them using ZSA’s Oryx configurator software. The software lets you program any key to be any other key, or a macro, or a media playback button, or even a mouse click. Keys can have different functions when tapped, held, double-tapped, or tapped and held. You can even set different layers of keys that are activated by pressing another key. This type of customization is pretty standard for enthusiast keyboards, but I’ve found Oryx’s software to be particularly easy to use. Once you’ve decided on a layout, you can flash it to the keyboard using ZSA’s Keymapp app.

I should say here that the Voyager and Navigator are not cheap. The Voyager is $365, while the Navigator is $169, so the total cost is $534. If you want the tripod mount, that costs an additional $89 — and the tripod itself isn’t included. These are accessories for people who have very specific typing needs or who really want to go deep on customizing their tools.

Usually, I fit both of those criteria. My typical current setup is a split ergonomic keyboard, the 95-key Kinesis Freestyle Pro, and a vertical ergonomic mouse, the Contour Unimouse. I taught myself Colemak after spending my entire life on QWERTY. At one point I alternated between a regular mouse and a full-sized trackball. For a while I used a rollermouse as my daily driver. And I went really deep with the Moonlander, even making a layer dedicated to shortcuts for watching YouTube videos. I’m no stranger to the fun and suffering of switching up my computing input devices, or to going to great lengths for a more ergonomic setup.

But with the 52-key Voyager, I just keep finding myself a few keys short of a layout that feels right to me. The thing I missed the most was a reliable set of arrow keys. I could use a layer or a fancy shortcut of some kind, but they’re so critical to my day-to-day work of futzing with text and cursors that I don’t want to trip over myself to get to them. And the trackball module doesn’t come with mouse keys. I put the left and right mouse click buttons under my thumb on the left side of the keyboard. But that took away two keys on the default layer I could use for something else.

Unlike my Kinesis, which is essentially a standard staggered keyboard that’s chopped in half, the Voyager is a columnar keyboard, meaning the keys for each finger are in a straight line above and below each other, and my fingers sometimes got tangled up when I used it. The Moonlander is also a columnar keyboard, and that took a couple weeks to get comfortable with, too.

I’m going to be honest: I got frustrated with the Voyager after a week and didn’t use it at all over a busy stretch of events like the iPhone 17 launch or my trip to Meta Connect. In my work, I have to be a very fast writer and communicator, and as fun as the Voyager and Navigator are to use, I was much slower with them than my usual setup. While I would love to spend hours after work or on a weekend perfecting my setup, as a father to a very busy toddler, I just don’t have the time or energy to make that happen.

This might just be a me thing. I think before my kid was born, I could have gone all-in on making the Voyager and the Navigator work. I did it with the Moonlander, after all, which has a similar columnar layout, and I only switched away from that because I realized that the Kinesis fit my hands better long-term. And to my great surprise while writing this draft, I settled back into the Voyager and Navigator really easily. I still have issues with my layout, but I thought coming back cold from a long break was going to be a lot more difficult.

For the right person, I think the Voyager and Navigator could be an awesome desk upgrade to tinker with and customize. I’m not that person right now. But I want to be again — having a trackball attached directly to my keyboard is a whole lot of fun.