I used an *Kinesis Ergo Elan* when I had RSI but then I realized that switching keyboards didn’t help me where as working less did. For a while I also tried to use a FingerWorkds TouchStream keyboard, but my finger tips still hurt. So now I just use the cheapo keyboards at work and my laptop’s keyboard at home.
Recently, however, I was interested in two wooden base keyboards because I wanted something new. Not sure whether I’ll be using them at all, to be honest. A vanity thing I guess.
1. I joined the kickstarter for keyboard.io
2. I queued up for a pre-assembled Atreus
Both cost around $300 + ca. $20 shipping + an estimated $40 tax and service charge, I guess. Yikes!
#Keyboard
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I’d say “get foot pedals”. As weird as it sounds, but I see no reason for that not to work.
Here is my fight with RSI: (please note that I started it before I actually got RSI, I knew that it would happen one day)
https://files.progarm.org/2015-08-22-173030_1072x340_scrot.png
And some things I did now, but I’m still waiting for these things to arrive:
My expenses so far:
Everything else is just reconfiguration which has no cost but takes some time. Rewiring your brain takes much more time though.
At this point my right hand is getting better, but I’ve noticed that it is very sensitive to **all other activities besides typing**. Handwriting, slicing some meat, using any tools – all this starts the pain immediately. But typing is OK, which means that what I’m doing is actually working.
– AlexDaniel 2015-08-22 15:31 UTC
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This is going to be interesting. Let’s hope it all works out for you!
I think fixing “all other activities besides typing” is also a worthy goal. 😄
My interest in keyboards these days is no longer driven by my fear of pain, and that’s great. I might give Dvorak a try. 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2015-08-22 20:56 UTC
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Well, it depends. I’d say that it is a bit too late.
There are so many other things that you can improve without too much of the effort. For example: move arrows, home&end, backspace, delete and enter to altgr+key level. Get a foot pedal and use it as altgr. Relearning a couple of keys is not hard, just pick ones that cause most of the trouble (like the ones I suggested, they are located a bit too far). Foot pedal should feel natural as well.
It is a thing that you can get used to in a couple of **days**.
Dvorak will take several **years** to get you to the same speed.
I was typing for about ≈8 years when I switched to Dvorak. Which basically means that getting to the same level will take me 8 years or less, which is not too bad. Hopefully less. And indeed, it took more than a year of dvorak-only typing to start noticing that I’m probably as efficient as I was (and did I mention that it was my **third** attempt to switch that actually worked?). Still not there in terms of typing speed, I think, but pretty damn close.
“Hopefully less” could also mean “probably more”. If you learned to type when you was a kid, then probably nothing will beat that ever. And I was really damn young when I started typing. I think that people should be aware of trouble that will be continuously there during the switch. Given that the switch will take at least a year, then yeah, it is pretty hard. Bloody keyboard layouts and poor design decisions.
– AlexDaniel 2015-08-22 22:27 UTC
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Bilingual writing is an additional issue. I want to write English and Swiss German. I can more or less switch between US American, German, and Swiss German layouts, with some intermittent swearing. We’ll see.
– Alex Schroeder 2015-08-23 12:46 UTC
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Huh? You have several layouts? I don’t think that you need that. Have you tried ’de(us)’ layout? It is basically all standard us keys with altgr-ed German letters – no need to have several layouts. That’s what I used for a long time to type Estonian letters.
In GNU/Linux, you can use this to try it out:
setxkbmap 'de(us)'
Now that you mentioned German, it reminded me of neo layout. Which is also available in any GNU/Linux distro, it is ’de(neo)’.
– AlexDaniel 2015-08-23 18:52 UTC
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I think the reason this all started was unfree Apple software. I bought a German external keyboard for my iPad 1. There, language determines both keyboard layout and spell-checking and auto-correct. Which is why I had to get used to US American and German layouts. No big deal! 😄 Those layouts are not too different. Y/Z, the position of single and double quotes, the position of `+` `=` `?` and `*` – and you’re basically done.
– Alex Schroeder 2015-08-24 05:38 UTC
