gwax's rumblings

I’ve always been rather fond of try­ing new things that twist the way I think about and inter­act with things and com­put­ers are no excep­tion. Ever since I used The Typing of the Dead to learn how to touch type, I have taken an inter­est in key­board lay­outs and designs and the more time I spend typ­ing in my life, the more I come to under­stand the effects of typ­ing com­fort com­pounded over time. Prior to 2001, I was a ded­i­cated 2 – 4 fin­ger typ­ist, capa­ble of achiev­ing over 30-40wpm using what amounted to “hunt and peck” with­out the hunt­ing; it was essen­tially a suc­ces­sive off­set­ting solu­tion using mem­o­rized rel­a­tive posi­tions to guide my hands. Then, in 2001, I built my beloved thevoid and got a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro because it looked cool, had a USB hub and some neat pro­gram­ma­ble func­tion but­tons. The Natural key­board has the fairly stan­dard split key­board lay­out, which com­pletely broke my rel­a­tive posi­tion scheme – the gap in the mid­dle pre­vented cross-overs, which were inte­gral to the scheme. At that point I slowly began learn­ing how to touch type but later in the year, I dis­cov­ered The Typing of the Dead and that changed every­thing; in addi­tion to mak­ing speed typ­ing a game, it also included a very use­ful typ­ing tutor.

Having learned proper touch typ­ing, I had divorced myself from cross-overs and was able to enjoy the com­fort pro­vided by a split key­board. Additionally, at this time, I was liv­ing in a dor­mi­tory with my good friend, Riad, who swears by Kinesis ergonomic key­boards, which I must agree are really com­fort­able. The Kinesis key­board is prob­a­bly the most com­fort­able and ergonomic key­board solu­tion that I had encoun­tered prior to the jerry-rigged solu­tion that I’ve just devised (see below). The Kinesis key­boards, how­ever, have the huge dis­ad­van­tage of being really expensive.

From there, my key­board exper­i­ments lan­guished for a num­ber of years until one day, when I was bored, I put let­tered stick­ers on thevoid’s key­board keys and switched the lay­out to a Dvorak lay­out. Learning Dvorak was not entirely pain­less and I even­tu­ally gave it up because the posi­tions of the ‘[/{‘ and ’]/}’ keys made C/C++ pro­gram­ming incon­ve­nient – this later turned out to be because I didn’t full learn to touch-type Dvorak. I have switched to Dvorak and back prob­a­bly half a dozen times since, get­ting bet­ter each time; some­times using Dvorak and QWERTY con­cur­rently on dif­fer­ent machines. At this point, I can switch between Dvorak and QWERTY with ease and I can say, with­out reser­va­tion, that Dvorak is much eas­ier, faster and more com­fort­able than QWERTY. At present, I am using QWERTY because some of my key­boards are not suited to Dvorak lay­outs and it makes my new con­fig­u­ra­tion more practical.

Recently, I’ve started to notice more so than before, how very uncom­fort­able it is to touch-type on an unsplit key­board; the arm and wrist con­tor­tion is ter­ri­ble. I was think­ing that I might do well to ask the IT depart­ment at work if I could get a split key­board but I’m much more the type to impro­vise an elab­o­rate solu­tion than walk 100 feet and ask some­one for some­thing. I asked myself what the ideal lay­out would be and decided that a split key­board solves the wrist con­tor­tion but it still requires the arms to be uncom­fort­ably tight in to the body. The solu­tion: two key­boards, one 45° left, one 45° right, mouse in the cen­ter; each hand uses half a key­board and it turns out to be really com­fort­able. If I want to adjust how one hand rests, I only need to adjust that one key­board. Sure it takes a lot of desk space but I have that in spades right now and it really com­ple­ments my multi-monitor setup. This is my akimbo solu­tion and I really like it; if you know how to touch-type, have the desk space and a spare key­board, I highly rec­om­mend giv­ing it a try. Having just checked with a small online test, I am aver­ag­ing about 60wpm and 96% accu­racy with my key­boards akimbo layout.

Also, just so we’re clear, I do know that akimbo is ety­mo­log­i­cally incor­rect but it is a lin­guis­tic muta­tion that I approve of.