Someone somewhere in these forums recommended it, and I’m super grateful! It is a fun little open world exploring game with some monsters and some puzzles. I am not personally much of a gamer, but I enjoyed it, and it made the transition to fluency much easier.
Once I got through it I went cold turkey and put my Kinesis in a box in our household tech boneyard, and made myself learn to use the Model 01 full time. That’s about three weeks ago now, and I have returned pretty much to my former typing speed. I slowed myself down with layout changes, though.
I recommend trying the weird (to me) placements of the inner row keys. I wanted to change them right away, but was having trouble figuring out how to alter the keymaps so used them as is, and I’m glad I gave them a try.
Personally the thumb buttons don’t work well for me, as I have arthritic thumbs and so need to shift as much work as possible away from them.
I remapped the palm buttons to space and backspace, and that’s working splendidly for me.
The same way I teach myself a new layout: through grit and determination and utter refusal to use a chart or look at the keyboard.
Actually, adjusting to the Keyboardio was pretty easy. I come from a Kinesis, so my fingers are used to the staggered columnar layout; the only oddity was in the thumb keys and modifiers, which took about an hour. I initially rushed to change the layout to be closer to my Kinesis, but I’ve since rolled it back to stock, and I’ve come to like the default layout.
I’m not making many mistakes (save for sometimes flipping space and backspace in my mind), but my speed hasn’t yet recovered. I’m only at around 60wpm instead of 120. I got my Keyboardio on Saturday.
Now that I’m home, I took a look at Epistory. It seems pretty interesting. Would you say it’s worth getting? I have Typing of the Dead: Overkill, which is fun, but violent and risqué enough that I hesitate to recommend it to just anyone.
I’ll second @Jennigma in recommending Epistory. It’s a lovely little game, helped me getting used to my Model01 prototype too.
I also visited keyhero.com and 10fastfingers.com daily for some post-lunch typing exercise (10-15 minutes a day at most), and once I reached a comfortable speed (about 50WPM), I switched to the Model01 permanently. Reached my ErgoDox speed (~90WPM) about a week later.
Since I’m waiting on my Model 01 (but it is looking like I’ll be in the group that ships this week ),I have not used anything yet…
But in the past I’ve used Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. Basically you “learn” and practice letters one at a time. So a bit more useful if you are learning a new layout (or you want to learn to do “proper” touch typing if you are not currently). It starts with home row letters and then moves on to other letters and punctuation. I bought a copy years ago when I first wanted to learn Dvorak on my DataHand. It was one of (if not the only) programs at the time that had lessons for Dvorak and not just Qwerty. (At the time, there were not the online tutorials like there are today.) You can keep practicing the new letter (along with the previous ones) for as long as you want until you move on to the next letter. It reports speed and error rates, emphasizing you should concentrate on accuracy first, not speed. And it starts using real words (rather than things like adad dada) as quickly as possible so you practice real bigrams and patterns. It also has some simple practice games in it. The games can be limited so you only practice the letters you have “learned” already in the tutorial portion. It’s reasonably priced and a decent program. It can be a little hokey/corny in places, but nothing horrible.
I’ll likely use it when I get my Model 01 to drill and practice with since I never actually switched to Dvorak on my “normal” keyboard after giving up on the DataHand (I just did not have the finger dexterity needed). But I plan to switch to Dvorak on the Model 01.
The games alone probably are not worth the £17/$22USD/€19 since there are just as good if not better things online today. But for something that can “drill” you on letters, its decent and worth it.
I’m also going to try Epistory that Jen and algernon mention.
@javaru If you’re interested in Dvorak, Dan Wood’s ABCD is a great, free resource. I learned DV in three days - although I needed to type full time for a few weeks to be able to stop thinking about it.
The story was about 9 hours of play time for me, but there are “arenas” you can fight that are endless.
It was absolutely worth it for me. I’m considering a replay because I enjoyed it, and would like another round now that I’ve been through once.
I have been using the Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor@Javaru mentioned a couple posts back to refine my touch typing ability, and it’s been a worthwhile (though boring) exercise.
I can’t recommend Epistory enough. I tried it based on Jennigma’s recommendation and it’s the best typing game I’ve tried yet. The art is lovely, the game itself is a lot of fun and it dynamically changes difficulty based on your skill. I didn’t even notice how much better my typing was getting because I was too busy having fun focusing on the gaming aspects.
There’s environments to explore, collectibles to gather, puzzles to solve, upgrades to get, etc.
I’ve tried 6 other typing games in the past week and the majority were either pretty boring and one dimensional, or focused on making words out of letter jumbles instead of typing ability, or punished you for making mistakes to the point that I had less fun playing them.
You can get a bundle of 4 or so typing games including Epistory on steam but I’d recommend only getting Epistory as the others were pretty unremarkable in comparison.
Why didn’t I think of this? Unfortunately, I like the extra functionality and my thumbs are fine, just some wrist pain from ulnar deviation. But once I figured out OSM (one shot modifiers) for shifting, oh my goodness, like adding butter to a baked potato. As it stands, I have one shotted both shifts and the left alt, I’ve also mapped Key_CapsLock to fn + c.
The most difficult part for me has been hitting page down for shift instead of using the thumb keys. Coming from kinesis, I’m used to space, backspace, and enter there. Tab is a bit weird too. But its so much fun messing with the M01.
Just mentioning that double-tapping a OneShot modifier “locks” the modifier, so in this case double-tapping Shift would give CapsLock. (And then tapping again cancels.) If you like Fn+c, go for it, but thought I’d share an alternative.
),I have not used anything yet…