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?
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.