

Ask HN: programming with a chording keyboard - kunle

A friend of mine has recently been having some difficulties with typing: turns out it isn&#x27;t his wrists, but rather he&#x27;s pinching a nerve somewhere in his arm&#x2F;back whenever he flattens his arms out to type. I&#x27;ve been investigating alternative keyboards and came across the Twiddler chording keyboard (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tekgear.com&#x2F;keyboards&#x2F;chording-keyboards.html). Has anyone used this to program and if so how was your experience? What major drawbacks did you experience? He uses emacs as his primary editor and is mostly in an SSH shell.
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CyberFonic
I haven't tried the particular keyboard you referenced. But I went through a
phase of building and testing such keyboards - mostly variants on Doug
Engelbart's design. I could never get decent speed and some chords were harder
on my fingers than a regular keyboard. The biggest problem is that with five
fingers, the maximum number of chords is 31 before you have "slide" positions,
i.e two or more keys to one finger / thumb.

Remembering codes for characters took a lot of time too.

Might be far easier to investigate exactly how and when the nerve pain arises.
I used to have a massive issue with mice. Solved it by using a trackball under
right hand and a mouse (with optical sensor for positioning disabled) under
the left hand. So I wasn't moving the mouse and clicking at the same time.
That was enough to overcome my RSI issue. I also currently use a MS Curve
keyboard. It is what works best for me. Some of my colleagues use those weird
MS ergonomic keyboards with split areas and funny looking wrist rests.

