I’ve always been fascinated by typing, I learned touch typing when I was 7 on some old dos touch typing teaching program, I don’t quite know why, but there is something about the sound of a keyboard that sounds really soothing to me and it’s just fascinating seeing how the presses quickly turns into text.

Language learning and writing systems is something that also has been interesting, and of course I then came into the space of alternative keyboard layouts, at least as I got older and I found that my wrists were starting to hurt.

My first adventure into alternative keyboard layouts was like it is for many to try out the dvorak layout, I spent some time learning it, and it was nice for a while, until I found my left pinkey hurting from the placement of the L key on that layout.

So I went out on the search again, and ended up with colemak, and after a bit of research specifically colmak-caw (colemak with the curl angle and wide mods) and that’s what I’ve been using to type with for about a decade now (time flies). For more info on colemak mods dreymar has a really good page on that

There are some tricks that I’ve learned through the time that also helped my wrists and fingers hurt a lot less, and by now I don’t really have any pain any more, I’m happy that I managed to catch it early enough that some simple tweaks to how I work helped me enough to not need to be in pain.

The most counterintuitive thing probably is negative tilt of the keyboard, to have the highest point of the keyboard being closest to ones wrists, so that the spacebar is at the highest point. It really helps the fingers hit the keys in a more comfortable way, but it looks a bit weird, because for some reason the keyboard always have feet to make it tilt the opposite way, I don’t know why that is the case really.

I’ve been fascinated by mechanical and split keyboard, but I have always been too much of a miser to actually go for one of them. Probably the one that I’ve always been the most interested in is the kinesis advantage, but I don’t know if I will ever get there, I’ve been using scissor keyboards for years now, and I’m pretty happy with that, I like the feeling of them, and they have served me well, at least with the colemak wide mode that lets me put my shoulders a little bit more apart to not get that cramped feeling when writing, even on a laptop keyboard.

I also like having my keyboard far down, to not hunch my shoulders up, at work I have a tall chair, so that I can look down on my screens, and leave my arms more relaxed, and at home mostly I have my keyboard in my lap while computing.