So I’m far enough in my keyboardio journey that I thought it’d be nice to get down that it’s been a journey of success!
I probably would never have come across keyboardio and would have settled for an ergodox or somesuch long ago if it weren’t for my perfectionist streak- every keyboard I came across seemed to have crappy thumb keys (better than traditional layout’s solitary one, but still crappy). Once I saw keyboardio I know that thumb arcs was the way to go, and had to have one. That set me even further on a bender of perfection, this time with the layout (I’d always wanted to design my own, and changing to a drastically different keyboard seemed like an ideal time to implement one. This also led to me wanting to have keys for punctuation which act as all of the keystrokes you normally do to end a sentence and start a new one (punctuation mark, space, hold down shift), and on and on with little refinements.
It’s now 4 months since I received it but more like 2 1/2 months since I’ve actually had a proper chance to use it. Thanks to the keyboard’s design, the well-made tools for firmware creation, the tons of help from people on this forum and a heap of determination, here’s where I am now:
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Typing at full speed, despite learning a completely new layout of keys bearing almost no resemblance to QWERTY (disclaimer - I’m still not quite as fast as I was at work with QWERTY yet, I built up a massive amount of muscle memory of work-specific terminology and patterns of speech etc. over my five years there, but for general typing, I’m at my old speed). I have no doubt I will eventually overtake my old speed rather soon, because I still feel slow, and I attribute that to the more efficient keymap meaning less effort is put in so I feel myself doing less work.
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I am very fluently using the punctuation macros I mentioned earlier, especially the full stop one which works amazingly intuitively as a qukey with Shift. The only hitch here is that they work on keys being released rather than pressed, but that is an end of year project for me, and I’ve learned to work around it for now. I also have other macros, qukeys, function keys etc etc that make life a lot easier in many ways.
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My hands are more comfortable - I wasn’t in this for RSI reasons like many people here, but it was a consideration, and any benefit in this area could be preventing me from a world of frustration, so I’m all for it.
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And a weird thing today. I actually did feel some transient pain in my right hand today, (most likely from numberpad usage - the default where 789 are up in the top row where 789 normally are makes sense but the stretch is getting awkward for me given how often I use the numberpad, so I’m working on changing that layer so it’s more me-friendly). If I were typing on a regular keyboard, I probably would have had to wait until the pain went away before I was comfortable typing again. With Keyboardio, I was able to modify both the angle of the right half of the keyboard and the orientation of the right half relative to my body and I was back feeling comfortable again instantly! If I’d tried this on a single body keyboard, I would have had to do something very uncomfortable with my left hand to make it work and probably cause myself some muscle problem from that as a result, but Keyboardio meant I had the flexibility to make it work just right for both hands, woo!
So basically, yay Keyboardio for helping awesome things happen, and thanks to all who have helped that along!