Learning to Type

I was under the impression that I was a good typist, but getting an ergonomic keyboard taught me otherwise.

I have long been fascinated by the world of keyboards. I have several mechanical keyboards, most from Ducky. They are wonderful, but they all have in common that they are traditional keyboards. This means that your hands are close together on the keyboard, closing your chest and forcing your hands in an awkward position. We all have become very used to this position, as this is the way typewriters taught us all how to type.

Then I found an Ergodox EZ on Marktplaats, a website where consumers can offer goods for sale. The price was still hefty, but not the 350+ euros it is brand new. A few days later it arrived, turns out it was indeed hardly used. It has started my journey to actually learn how to type again.

In the 30 years I have been in the software industry I learned to type quite fast, but putting my hands apart, each hand responsible for their own keys, turns out to be quite a challenge. There is even a blogpost on the topic by the creators of the keyboard. You see, it is not just the hands apart that gets you, it is the columnar key-setting. This means that the keys are not only separated but instead of staggered as on a normal keyboard, they are in a line above each-other.

The other thing about the keyboard is that you can customize pretty much everything. It has only 4 rows of keys, so many features of a normal keyboard hide in different layers on the keyboard. As I do a lot of coding and technical writing, I have different needs from someone who does novel writing. This is a great personalization of the keyboard for me, it truly represents me and the work I do. This is my current layout, notice the brackets on the side, and the access to CTRL and ALT in the middle. This was taken from connecting it on a mac.

I now have a little over a week with this layout, and it seems to work very nicely for me. My words-per-minute are going up again and it feels natural. Soon I will need to get a carry case for my keyboard as normal keyboards are starting to feel alien to me.