I'm mostly-maintaining a mechanical split keyboard gallery [1] to help with this. There are a lot of options, from keyboards you can buy from a major retailer (or easily get your IT department to buy), to hand-soldered kits where you need to 3D print the case.-
I've always been interested in buying one, but since I'm curre tly budgeting for other major investments I'm not willing to spend like 350€+ for an ergodox. Are there decent sub 100€ non diy (i have never soldered anything in my life) split keyboards around afayk?
If your main concern about DIY keyboards is experience, most DIY split keyboards only require through-hole soldering, which is easily doable even with a cheap soldering iron.
Microsoft Sculpt is quite good. It is not mechanical, not truly split. But one that my hand can agree with. It is also the one I travel with because the mechanical split I have is too heavy.
I don't think you'll find anything non-DIY for under €350. The cheapest options are probably the Chinese/AliExpress ortholinear ones[1], but even those still cost more.
I recommend getting into keyboard groups on discord and facebook. In Australia I've seen people selling second hand assembled split boards for less than cost of the parts.
This is incredibly helpful, thank you! It's going to save me hours of research.
I have a Das Keyboard that I am very fond of, but over the years have definitely started to wonder why a) the rows are staggered, and b) it isn't split. There's just so little reason to stick to this form-factor.
Oh wow - this is a much more extensive collection than the one I used to buy my last split mechanical (a perfectly functional but unimpressive Kinesis Freestyle2 Blue). Thank you!
[1] https://aposymbiont.github.io/split-keyboards/