Programmability . My customization is light compared to some people’s, but my keyboard usage is pretty idiosyncratic, so it’s important to me to be able to customize my keyboard when I need to. Particularly for keyboards with fewer keys that need heavier layer usage, I want to be able to set up the layers as I want. My most elaborate customization is that I am (from time to time) a hobbyist stenographer , and rather than having a separate device I find it convenient to be able to configure my keyboard to speak one of the steno protocols understood by Plover such as TX Bolt or GeminiPR.
Thumb clusters . The first symptom I got was what’s affectionately known as ‘emacs pinky’. In fact, on most keyboards (though sadly no longer on ThinkPads) the control key, positioned in the bottom-right corner, can and should be held with the palm — this makes some combinations more awkward, though no more awkward than with the little finger, and saves the weakest digit. In fact, I think it would be better named for vi — the escape key is perhaps the least ergonomic key on a standard keyboard. Some people like to put it in the place of caps-lock, which is of course entirely missing the point. The reason I picked up the Kinesis Advantage is that on these keyboards the thumb, which is highly underutilized in standard layouts, gets a dedicated cluster of keys, perfect for things like modifiers, since the opposable thumbs don’t limit the motion of the rest of the hand at all, no matter how it’s engaged.
Tenting . Ditto for the elbows: last year I found myself struggling with pain and numbness in my arm that, on investigation, matched symptoms of early cubital tunnel syndrome. Tenting, rotating the halves of the keyboard so that the wrists sit in a slight angle, allows the elbows to rest in a more natural slightly-bent position, and since adopting it I haven’t had any further problems with my elbow.
Split halves . Any keyboard with the halves joined together (that is narrower than shoulder-width, as is the case with every joined keyboard I’ve seen so far) causes the elbows to bend in and the wrists to bend out, which seems to be the primary trigger of wrist pain for me.
At the same time I’m really interested in human/machine interaction and ways to get the contents of the human brain into a machine as fluently as possible. As a combined result of these two factors, I worked my way through a few different physical keyboards, including the Microsoft Ergonomic series (which I struggled to make Windows 2000 recognize — go figure) and a Kinesis Advantage, but my keyboard of choice for many years now has been the Ergodox EZ . The Ergodox (and its ZSA comrade the Moonlander) is a solid keyboard, with a few features that I’ve come to realize are very important:
Even before I started pressing buttons for a living I was always a pretty heavy computer user. When I was about 18 I started experiencing symptoms of RSI. At around the same time I learnt of the Dvorak keyboard layout, and so I switched, hoping it would solve my problems. It did, at least at the time, and so for the last 17 years I’ve been a Dvorak user.
I loved the compact form factor combined with the power of chording, and I was excited to develop a new steno theory based on the CharaChorder’s unique structure. Unfortunately, I was thwarted: the CC1 runs the CharaChorder OS, a closed-source project with only a restricted set of chording configurations, and the fact that it must take place on-device severely limits what can be done compared to the software-based solutions I was used to. The CC1 is great for people who need to travel and connect their device to many different computers, but that’s not my use-case. Furthermore ergonomics are decidedly not a priority for the CharaChorder, with (for example) the down presses being a chord of each of the cardinal directions, for a hefty (42 × 4 = 168) grams of force to activate, and some default chords requiring punishing scissoring and twisting motions that left my hands very sore after a practice session. The final straw for me was that a month or so into using the CC1 one of my joysticks broke, coming loose in its housing; CC were kind enough to send me a replacement half, but shortly after that arrived the same thing happened to a joystick on the remaining half from the first keyboard! I hear that the build quality has improved significantly on the CC2; please don’t be put off from trying it by this experience of mine! It remains a really nifty device, especially if you regularly need to transport your keyboard and use it with computers whose software you don’t control, or if you want to attach the keyboard to your trousers .
If you’ve ever done typing training, you’ll know that most of the point of the drills and forms that they teach you is to keep your fingers on the home row so that you can reach all the letters with a minimum of movement. The CharaChorder turns this on its head: on the CharaChorder there is only the home row. Where you would stretch up or down or sideways to reach a key on a traditional keyboard, on the CharaChorder you simply wiggle a joystick in that direction, never taking your finger off the key. There is in fact a second row of joysticks used for arrow keys or mouse emulation, but we’ll ignore them for the purposes of this since they don’t impact most of the typing experience.
With this in mind, I was pretty excited when I stumbled across the CharaChorder . The promise is simple: increase typing speed through a combination of minimizing finger movement and stenography-style chording (albeit with a theory designed to have a shallower learning curve, basically just mashing all the letters of the word at once). I signed up to the pre-order, and when I got it I immediately started playing around, practising a few hours per day on the (very good!) training software.
Alternatively, as a more general solution, QMK supports binding a ‘repeat’ key that can be used to repeat the previous keypress. If you bind that key to an easily-repeatable key you can use it to comfortably repeat any key on the keyboard. I’ve tried this a couple of times, but the combination of sacrificing a prime key with the mental overhead make it not worth it for me, compared to rearranging the keys that need to be repeated.
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