Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.

Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.

How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?

  • @Gumshoe
    6•2 years ago

    As a programmer with a 36 key keyboard, I actually find symbol typing easier for the most part than it was before. Mainly because I find the number row symbols easier to touch type when there isn’t any hand movement involved. Do you look at your hands when typing %? How about F6? I did it without even realize I was doing that, but now that I have a numpad layer for all my numbers and number row symbols (and no legends on my keycaps to prevent me from looking even if I wanted to) I touch type those symbols much better than I did before.

    Your keyboard didn’t have dedicated {} keys before either. Those were shift+[] before, and now, for my layout, they are symbol layer+{} which is the same number of keystrokes and same level of complexity, though I had to relearn a lot to do that.

    I use home-row mods (well, bottom-row mods, actually) and apart from some combos having an extra key being held down, the idea that I’m now holding those keys with dedicated sensible fingers and without any hand movement means they aren’t any harder than before. For example, what fingers are you even using when you type “ctrl+alt+shift+something”? Now, on my 36 key layout, I’m just holding bottom row index finger, bottom row middle finger, bottom row ring finger, maybe a thumb layer key which might be an extra button than before and typing the actual keystroke itself with the opposite hand. This has really helped me improve my opposite hand modifier skills as well as I often neglected to use right-ctrl on my traditional keyboard.