For software engineers, a normal QWERTY keyboard requires the pinky on the right hand to press a ton of different keys, and my pinky joint was getting sore.
I bought this Ergodox EZ keyboard and remapped the “P” and various brackets to extra keys that are easily-pressable with my forefinger or thumb. It took a couple weeks to stop being annoyed by the new layout, and a couple months to return to my old typing speed, but this is a lifelong ROI.
There’s another major bonus: I can now separate my arms far apart when I type, instead of squishing them together to accommodate a one-piece keyboard.
Ah ya I didn’t realize Dvorak helps significantly with layout of punctuation. The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard looks great, only thing for me is I prefer the two sides extra far apart and I think Ergodox’s cable span is an extra foot or so.
+1 on UHK—also, get more than one if you like it and spend significant time in multiple locations (I have one for my home workstation and one for my office, though both are at home just now...).
Definitely try the ergodox as well, but I couldn’t get used to the ortho layout, when I have to switch back to a standard keyboard occasionally (using a laptop away from my station). UHK is standard size/layout of keys, so running AutoHotKey (for Windows; there’s an equivalent for OSX) lets me use the same layers on the standard keyboard as on my UHK. Built-in KB is still inferior in feel, and in lack of distance/angle between hands, but the muscle memory of mod-HJKL for arrows and nearby keys for other nav is retained.
This layout has worked decently well for me and I haven’t tweaked it in months, but it makes major tradeoffs, most notably:
1. No arrow keys in the main layer
2. The same key can be either enter or right shift so occasionally I accidentally hit enter in a chatroom when I don’t want to. But at least my thumbs can do a lot of heavy lifting.
On a similar note, I use a kinesis advantage; I had to choose between that and an ergodox and expected to like it slightly more, but I can’t actually compare.
I’ve set it up so that if I hold caps lock, I can control the mouse with my right hand. Not as fluidly as I’d like, at least partly due to (what I believe to be) bugs in the xkb code implementing such things. I can only move 100px at a time. But I also have focus-follows-mouse, and that makes it really easy to jump between two windows, which by itself is a decently big win.
caps lock also mirrors the right side of the keyboard to the left, letting me type (slowly) with one hand and mouse with the other. I haven’t ended up using that much though.
My solution for keyboard RSI:
For software engineers, a normal QWERTY keyboard requires the pinky on the right hand to press a ton of different keys, and my pinky joint was getting sore.
I bought this Ergodox EZ keyboard and remapped the “P” and various brackets to extra keys that are easily-pressable with my forefinger or thumb. It took a couple weeks to stop being annoyed by the new layout, and a couple months to return to my old typing speed, but this is a lifelong ROI.
There’s another major bonus: I can now separate my arms far apart when I type, instead of squishing them together to accommodate a one-piece keyboard.
I solved the same problem by using Dvorak.
I really love my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard which looks pretty similar to the Ergodox EZ one.
Ah ya I didn’t realize Dvorak helps significantly with layout of punctuation. The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard looks great, only thing for me is I prefer the two sides extra far apart and I think Ergodox’s cable span is an extra foot or so.
+1 on UHK—also, get more than one if you like it and spend significant time in multiple locations (I have one for my home workstation and one for my office, though both are at home just now...).
Definitely try the ergodox as well, but I couldn’t get used to the ortho layout, when I have to switch back to a standard keyboard occasionally (using a laptop away from my station). UHK is standard size/layout of keys, so running AutoHotKey (for Windows; there’s an equivalent for OSX) lets me use the same layers on the standard keyboard as on my UHK. Built-in KB is still inferior in feel, and in lack of distance/angle between hands, but the muscle memory of mod-HJKL for arrows and nearby keys for other nav is retained.
Can you link your ergodox config? I’m currently trying to build mine and suffering from feature creep.
This layout has worked decently well for me and I haven’t tweaked it in months, but it makes major tradeoffs, most notably:
1. No arrow keys in the main layer
2. The same key can be either enter or right shift so occasionally I accidentally hit enter in a chatroom when I don’t want to. But at least my thumbs can do a lot of heavy lifting.
On a similar note, I use a kinesis advantage; I had to choose between that and an ergodox and expected to like it slightly more, but I can’t actually compare.
I’ve set it up so that if I hold caps lock, I can control the mouse with my right hand. Not as fluidly as I’d like, at least partly due to (what I believe to be) bugs in the xkb code implementing such things. I can only move 100px at a time. But I also have focus-follows-mouse, and that makes it really easy to jump between two windows, which by itself is a decently big win.
caps lock also mirrors the right side of the keyboard to the left, letting me type (slowly) with one hand and mouse with the other. I haven’t ended up using that much though.