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?
I use a 30% split keyboard as my daily driver for work as a software developer. I use a keymapping where holding the F key down turns the right side into a numpad plus some of the other punctuation, and holding D down gives me the shifted versions of all that. So I have to chord to get the esoteric symbols but I don’t have to actually move my left hand from home row to chord. I don’t think this is a very common way of doing things though. I’m not sure it’s any better than using a bigger keyboard, but I’m used to it now.
Yeah, I do the same with my thumb keys, they shift the layer so the symbols/numbers are all one handed typing operation. I use homerow mods so there’s even less finger shifting but that also means I don’t use the homerow for layers. It’s definitely a learning curve, especially since my keycaps don’t have a legend but you get used to it pretty quickly. I need to return to a right side being numpad, I got clever with F keys but I only use 4 F keys, I should just optimize for those, it doesn’t need to be a “sensible” layout for anyone else.