I ordered a Kinesis keyboard on joining Automattic, figuring that I would try to kick the new year off taking ergonomics seriously. It feels like I have so far gone through two periods of learning, and still getting with respect to matching the rate of touch typing on Mac laptop keyboard.
The first phase was rough, feeling like a basic hunt and peck. I’d quickly get frustrated and go back to the laptop keyboard, or the small Mac wireless silver keyboard. So somewhere between one and two hours a day. That phase was from late February until say around first week in March. I took a couple weeks break out of frustration and then picked up last week in March.
Phase II seemed remarkably better, much faster touch typing to the point of being relaxed and less having to think about where the keys are. The challenge so far seems to be around getting into the zone as far as emacs keys are concerned. That is, the META- and CONTROL keys still present a problem for me, and it still seems a bit weird in terms of the Mac key mapping for the kinesis (I’m using Advantage ). Having the the CONTROL key be right next to either thumb seems like the more appropriate mapping to have. I still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with numbers effectively. Strangely enough, it almost seems like although I’m creating globs of floats everyday, most of those are generated by the machine.
The real issue is having faster access to the numeric operators, parens, brackets. So maybe the next goal is to work on those python and scala typing drills eh?
Charles write here 