About a year ago, my wrists were screaming at me. After spending hours every day typing on a standard keyboard (and holding my newborn after work) left me with significant wrist pain. After trying a few, I purchased a Moonlander from ZSA. After more than 70 revisions and constant experimentation, I have landed on a layout that is perfect for me… at least for now. Through this experimentation, I have looked through dozens of keyboard layouts and read articles on optimization, and this series will present my findings.
- QWERTY or other?
When I sat to try my coworker’s custom made keyboard for the first time I was excited. Would I be able to type as fast as on a standard keyboard? How cool would I look?! As I place my hands on the keys, he says, “Oh it’s Dvorak.” What was that, the brand of the keyboard? Was he listening to the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak?
Perhaps the most mind-blowing thing within custom keyboards is changing the layout of the letters. Turns out that the qwerty layout was not designed efficiently, so other conventions have emerged Legend of the QWERTY keyboard
The most convincing argument that I’ve seen for a different layout is the improved efficienty. Ultimately for me, I decided to stick with qwerty for a number of reasons:
-
In order to make a change like this, you really have to commit to it. When you try out dvorak, you’re not just going to slow down with coding. Trying to send a response on slack is going to be significantly slowed. You need to dedicate a significant amount of time to learning the new layout. One suggestion I’ve seen is to start to learn a new layout over a 2-week vacation.
-
The efficiency boost that I got with customizing everything else on my keyboard besides the letter layout was enough to see huge improvement in my wrist pain. One of the tools that ZSA offers is a heatmap mode in their app Keymapp. It shows you what keys you hit most often. The picture below shows my heatmap from a couple of hours of typing, as you can see the most hit keys are on or near the homerow and first thumb.
After tackling the main layer, it’s time to figure out how many keys to use. Some people love taking advantage of the Moonlander’s 76 keys, but there are some people who are trying to reduce the number of keys aggresively. Part 2 will look into the options, stay tuned!