There's a ton of rethinking what a keyboard is that is going on in the ergo space right now as to what a keyboard _should_ be and how they should function. From physical layouts, curvature, keymaps, layering and combos it's interesting to see the experimentation going on. These devices are going to be used for the rest of our lives, they should at least be non-harmful over time.
Right now I'm using a GergoPlex, but my holy grail is a QMK'd DataHand. (And if you know who has one, please send them my way)
Curiously I find the opposite: home-row typing, or using wrist rests etc and keeping my hands static, cause me quite bad RSI. Instead I use a very "floating" style of typing where my hands move very freely over the keyboard, kinda like playing the piano.
That makes sense to me. You get repetitive stress injury from repetitive overuse of small and weak muscles, not from using bigger muscles (like your shoulders) to move your hands/arms in non-strenuous ways.
I've always felt the same way. My fingers naturally want to spread out, so pulling them close enough together to rest on the home keys causes a lot of tension.
Please substantiate that. From what I’ve heard these things can lead to injury:
1. Repeatedly/repetitively using small/weak/fine-motor muscles
2. Contorting your hands (like holding multiple modifirs with the same hand and also pressing whatever non-modifier)
Moving your whole hand from the venerable home row to for example the nav cluster doesn’t fall under any of the above, since you can move your arm with your shoulder. I have never had problems with using larger muscles like my shoulders all day for simple, non-strenuous tasks, and I haven’t heard of people who have reported problems with it yet. I have however heard of people who have gotten in trouble because they repeatedly do tiny motions with their fingers or hands. Which is tempting since it can feel easier to use those muscles for precise control -- I certainly pen-write with my wrist too much when I should be using my shoulder more -- but can easily lead to fatigue or worse.
I have had more problems with Emacs’ modifier-heavy default keybindings than I’ve ever had with modifier-less peasant software like word processors, ergonomics-wise.
It isn’t a problem for me ergonomically to move to the arrow keys if I want to do a bunch of “meta” keys like move word right or left,[1] which is harder to do on som fn-keyboard where you both have to hold down the shift key and the fn key. I also am able to use the arrow keys from the somewhat overrated home row, but that is on a non-configurable keyboard (remapped in software).
I would say that people have a minor point when they say that moving your hands wastes time. Kind of like me going for a five minute walk every so often wastes time compared to sitting at my desk for eight hours straight. Now I’m putting a fine point on it, but I actually think that even a little bit of gross movement like that can be more beneficial than hurtful.
I’ve used a cheap 60% keyboard for a while and it was never really my thing (just got it for the n-key rollover):
1. You can’t reprogram the fn key on the keyboard (again if cheap)
2. You can’t reprogram the fn key in software since it is effectively “blessed” (your OS can’t see it)
3. Now you’re stuck with whatever fn layout that they made, which is often subpar (example: my 60% has some fn-whatever combos that turn off keys or lock them which just causes problems whenever I accidentally press them (always accidentally))
4. Big Brand keyboards are customizable but their software is likely to be too limited, which means that you have to buy somewhat boutique keyboards in order to truly map the fn layer business the way you want
5. I already alluded to how multi-modifier keybindings can be a pain: a lot of software assume that you use a regular keyboard so they will throw keybindings like Ctrl+Shift+PageUp at you, which might translate to something unwieldy like Fn+Ctrl+Shift+P. That’s too much hassle. (Intellij is a real sinner in this regard.)
I currently use a tenkeyless keyboard which gives me the only less-than-fullsize keyboard advantage that I care about: my mouse is closer.
[1]: Yes, sometimes I use built-in/embedded editors or textfields (like Firefox’s address bar) that are not Vim or Emacs; No, I don’t want to configure every last software that I use that contain mini-editors to use some kind of Vim-like plugin so that I can e.g. move word-right with `w`.
> From what I’ve heard these things can lead to injury
I am not aware of real studies and conclusions on this matter. If you are subject to this problem, even finding professional expertise is difficult and eventually expensive. Investing 100-200 usd to experiment doesn’t sound absurd. In my experience, enthusiast keyboard hold their value pretty well if you are not satisfied.
Anyway, I like the small ortholinear keyboards with thumb keys because the whole keyboard is accessible with very little movements and combos do not require stretching.
Well if there are no real studies or conclusions then it could go either way. No one makes investments based on hacker folklore; that’s just an after the fact rationalization by people who were already enthusiasts.
I have experimented myself. That was what that whole post was about. I am quite picky when it comes to keyboards so I have bought a few of them over the last year. But my experiments won’t lead to “real studies”, nor will anyone else’s, so that point seems misplaced since you open your post by dismissing my anecdotes.
Somewhat expensive keyboards is a particular hobby for people with disposable income. Programmers don’t have some special need for typing speed or ergonomics compared to other office workers. If we did have a need for speed, for example, we would learn something like Plover since that would make us write at least twice as fast (at least for prose, but I type that quite often.) It also allows us to buy regular keyboards and not crazy expensive steno machines. But we don’t: instead we do some minor “optimizations” with one-key-per-letter keyboards like use the home row 25% more and gain 200% more subjective empowerement (I’ve customized my keyboard in software to do the same thing).
> Anyway, I like the small ortholinear keyboards with thumb keys because the whole keyboard is accessible with very little movements and combos do not require stretching.
No modifier combos require stretching on a regular keyboard as well; notice how all the modifier keys are close together in case you need to press multiple ones at the same time, and at least a few of them (like control and shift, maybe “Windows” and Alt) should be on both sides of the keyboard. Regular keyboards don’t have a stretching problem as long as you touch type.
> "programmers don’t have some special need for typing speed or ergonomics compared to other office workers."
not sure I can take that for granted; the need for typing speed could come from having to grind through a ton of boilerplate - you can see the desire coming through as intellisense/autocomplete, and from abbreviations like "str", "std", "int", "fn", "<T>", etc. instead of full names. Assume other office workers are writing English to communicate an idea, English doesn't start with public static void main implements EmailMessage, IMemo, getter, setter, whatever whatever. So maybe programmers do have a need for typing speed, because of using such inexpressive languages (APL/J/K programmers need not apply).
> "If we did have a need for speed, for example, we would learn something like Plover since that would make us write at least twice as fast (at least for prose, but I type that quite often.)"
Again, not sure I can take this for granted - Steno is used for transcription, it's basically another way of spelling every word, phonetically. My suspicion is that it's more mental work to use it than it is to write normally. Is it still as fast, as useful, if you also have to come up with what to write? Take this video of record holding court reporter Mark Kislingbury taking transcription:
His fingers move slowly to capture fast speech, but he is only writing the sounds down, he goes on to read back from the Steno phonetic transcript which you can see is not fleshed out English prose. That excuses him from any need for capturing homonyms, clashes between multi-syllable words vs separate words, punctuation, spelling, parentheses, caps on abbreviations, commas in numbers, etc.
Now take some person who came up in the search results for Plover videos, writing after ~6 months practise:
The words appear quite quickly, but there are lots of pauses and corrections which means I can approximately keep up with it on a QWERTY keyboard, losing ground when they are in flow and catching up when they pause. Impressive though it is, and maybe a little faster but it's still going to take them a lot more effort to get from here to anything like double this speed. The pauses and corrections suggest to me that it takes a lot more thought to do it - and the corrections of Steno mistakes aren't typos of individual letters in words, they're whole sound and word changes like REGOURDLESS instead of REGARDLESS and "Steno is much more ergonomic than questionnaire" instead of "than QWERTY". That is, a typo left in a normal typing document is usually understandable, a miskey with Steno is more jarring like an autocorrect substitution. And you can see slow parts, e.g. where they write numbers like 225, the farther you deviate from prose the harder it gets to go fast - and I do tend to write names of programs, names of servers, IP addresses, customer company name abbreviations, made up words and spellings for emphasis (like "customer says yoooooouuuuuuuuu broke it"), project and software and product and vendor names, and etc. AFAIK, a lot of the real speed boosts come from adding custom short briefs for long words you write a lot - e.g. specialising in legal, medical, or technical subjects and adding shortcuts for those, which you can potentially do with snippets and hotkeys to help normal typing overall. And of course, two full hands, a custom keyboard, and custom software.
That's not to say I don't like it, or don't respect it, or don't think it's faster, but it is more nuanced than simply being "learn it and write at least twice as fast". Mark Kislingbury is world class good, it is literally his job and his career and his record is 360 wpm. If everything you typed took you 1/3rd of the time, how much would that change your life? George R. R. Martin surely isn't holding off the last books of Game of Thrones because of typing speed. Typing speed probably isn't the limit of how many emails you can get through in your inbox, or how long you spend in meetings, or how clearly you can write documentation, or etc. I suggest if not using it as a career transcriber, considering it as hobby, or procrastination like people overly focused on their note taking systems instead of what the notes were supposed to be helping with. Almost every book or document or program ever written was written on qwerty or typewriter or pen and paper, and got on fine with it; good enough is good enough.
On another side of it, like the quote "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.", life and office life is overburdened by prose, it's already too easy to write paragraphs of guff that never gets to the point, who doesn't have an overflowing email inbox these days? Being able to churn it out faster possibly shouldn't be the goal - anyone wonder what it would be like if we all had to write like Stephen Hawking? Think as much as you like but turning it into text for someone else to read will cost you; making writers suffer, to make readers lives easier with less to read. Use a horrible painful keyboard, write less, your audience won't thank you because they won't be thinking of you, but good because the point should be to get out of their way not to take their attention for as long as you can.
> I currently use a tenkeyless keyboard which gives me the only less-than-fullsize keyboard advantage that I care about: my mouse is closer.
FINALLY an advantage to my "handicap": I use the numeric keypad somewhat frequently, and the additional size of the keyboard doesn't bother me at all. The number pad could be as large as another full-size keyboard, and my mouse wouldn't be a nanometre further away. And ever since I bought my left-handed mouse, it's comfortable and ergonomic and whatnot, too.
