My keyboard journey

Ergonomic keyboards

My journey in non-standard keyboard habits began in college when I began to experience wrist pain from repetitive typing motion. At the time, I was working on a project for a professor involving converting a large number of Word documents to HTML. Even after scripting many aspects of the conversion and making the rest of it easier with Vim macros, I ended up in pain after a few hours of repetitive motion.

My solution at the time was a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, which has a little vertical bulge at the center, reducing the strain of orienting your hands on a flat keyboard. Though it seems like a small thing, it made a pretty big difference for me, and I was a happy user for a few years, even ordering one for work.

Mechanical keyboards

At a certain point, I got into mechanical keyboards.

After observing that the number of keyboards which are both mechanical and ergonomic was quite small, I decided to chance it and got a pretty basic Cooler Master mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches. However, it became clear after a day or two that it just wasn't going to work for me - the flat hand orientation was just too painful, so I returned it and went back to the Sculpt for a few years.

Freestyle Edge

In 2019, I decided to give mechanical boards another try, and this time did more research, settling on the Kinesis Freestyle Edge. In addition to being mechanical, it has a very ergonomic design, with a split keyboard layout and tents which can be adjusted to a maximum of about 25 degrees.

From then on, I was sold on mechanical boards. The immediate feedback and overall experience is just so nice that typing on normal keyboards feels really squishy by comparison.

Layouts

In late 2020, I became inspired to try alternative keyboard layouts. Perhaps you could call it a pandemic interest. In any case, it was a minor obsession that has paid off.

Finding a layout

At the time I was faintly familiar with the concept of alternative keyboard layouts, but didn't know many people who used them on a regular basis. When I came across the carpalx website, I learned just how inefficient QWERTY was:

• Only ~35% of characters are on the home row
• High asymmetry between left and right hands
• High usage of weaker fingers like the pinky and ring fingers

Indeed, one of its original design principles was reducing jamming of typewriters - not exactly a principle for the modern age of typing.

In search of a new keyboard layout, I considered trying dvorak at first. It certainly scores much better on many of the above metrics - 71% of key strokes in the home row. However, it still suffers from hand asymmetry (this time in favor of the right hand), and makes even more use of the pinky fingers. I also didn't love the fact that the vowels were all on the left hand home row.

In the end, I settled on colemak (precisely, a mod known as mod-dh). The default has better base efficiency than dvorak, with more home row usage, more balanced hand use, and really good runs on the home row (e.g., common runs like "tion", "ient", "ting", "str" can all be done on the home row).

There's a good description for mod-dh here, but in summary, it improves on the default colemak experience by reducing middle column usage in favor of lower row index finger usage (the left hand of which is 'd', and the right hand of which is 'h' -- hence the name).

Two other common layouts I came across but decided to pass on:

• Workman: seems promising, but the biggest complaints with Colemak were solved by mod-dh
• Norman: also seems promising, but doesn't have any huge advantages over colemak, and seems like it has a smaller user base

I'm sure either of them is great, though - everything that is competitive at this stage is already so much better than QWERTY that it's not really worth quibbling too much about the differences; the best layout is the one that you use.

Learning a layout

Having chosen a new layout, I then faced the problem of trying to master it. While this was a rather daunting task at first given how much muscle memory had been built up with QWERTY over the years, in the end it turned out to be a rather smooth experience.

Here's a quick timeline:

• Weeks 1-2: practice on keybr.com for 30-60 minutes on a daily basis, all outside of work. The keybr website is a really great learning resource, starting you off with a small number of keys, and introducing new keys one at a time as you gain comfort with the existing patterns.
• Week 3: muddle through colemak for the first time at work. Try not to be too self-conscious if you're taking notes while sharing your screen during a meeting on a call with co-workers. At this stage, I knew all the keys, but was still developing proficiency, and was at about 60% my normal typing speed. Continue to practice on keybr.
• Weeks 4-5: add vim into the mix. People commonly decide between remapping keys to their positions in QWERTY for key motions like 'hjkl' or just living with the asymmetry and developing new muscle memory. In the end, I opted for the latter approach, and though it was a bit of a pain to adjust, I'm glad I went that route instead of the remapping keys, as I feel that would have been a rabbit hole of vim config editing.
• Week 6: Reach parity in terms of typing speed and proficiency in colemak, across both vim and English.

For me, learning a new layout was never really about improving speed, although it's possible that has been a minor byproduct. Instead, the core motivator has been efficiency, reducing typing fatigue, and improving long-term comfort. Hopefully with the combination of ergonomic hardware and an ergonomic layout, I have many years of typing comfort ahead of me!

Bonus: Moonlander

Around the same time that I got into keyboard layouts, I experienced the latest (and possibly final?) revolution in my typing - getting a Moonlander keyboard by ZSA. A friend at work spoke very highly of his Ergodox, and I thought it would be fun to customize the layers of keys. In addition, the ortholinear layout (with keys being oriented in columns rather than on rows) just made a lot of sense.

Describing my Moonlander experience probably deserves a more comprehensive post at some point, but in summary - it's been great! I love the ability to tweak and make the layout very personal, and the keyboard itself retains all the core ergonomic features I enjoyed about the Kinesis. For the interested, my current layout can be found here.