Enjoy! It took me quite a while to get used to the columnar layout on my Moonlander, but it’ll come with use. Just force yourself to stumble though using it and spend some time on the typing exercise websites to train yourself and it’ll come. Before you realize it you’ll be just as fast and accurate as you used to be.
ErgoMechKeyboards
Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards
Rules
Keep it ergo
Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)
i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²
¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid
No Spam
No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.
No Buy/Sell/Trade
This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.
Some useful links
- EMK wiki
- Split keyboard compare tool
- Compare keycap profiles Looking for another set of keycaps - check this site to compare the different keycap profiles https://www.keycaps.info/
- Keymap database A database with all kinds of keymap layouts - some of them fits ergo keyboards - get inspired https://keymapdb.com/
You're doing alright your fingers will get used to it...
I've done worse to myself: Shifted to an Ergodox and Colemak mod dh at the same time!
Enjoy!
Slow af but comfy
26 WPM on first day is pretty solid.
I dropped from 70 to 15 when starting with an Ergodox and it took me about 10 days to get back to 60+
(And then I decided to switch to Colemak layout which is much harder than Row stagger -> column stagger I’d say)
Took me about a few weeks to get really used to the columnar layout on my moonlander. However, I sat down one night early on and banged out my config and practiced with ZSA's learning tools and found it immensely helpful. Got me like 90% of the way there pretty quick. I try to retain the typing the same form on staggered layouts now, but it's still a context switch. Good luck!
If you're a programmer rather than a professional typist, you probably can use it at work. It took a couple of weeks for me to adjust, a couple of months to be fluent, but it would have been longer if I didn't use it all day every day.
The biggest hurdles for me personally were
- I didn't touch type properly before. I was a fast typist, but my hands roamed freely over the board. I realised that the finger I used to press a key depended on the word where it was used, and that took ages to re-learn.
- I bound enter and space to mode shift holds for symbols etc. It works great, but it does mean I sometimes hit enter and send half a slack message instead of typing punctuation.
I'm already doing a lot better, I'm going to take it to work tomorrow. My wpm are in the 60s now, though my accuracy needs some work. I realized I had some bad habits touch typing. I would reach for y with my left hand b with my right.
With Enter being a thumb key I've sent many unfinished typo ridden Discord and Teams messages.
I'm not a programmer, I do a little of everything in the IT world. Most of my typing at work is emails and documentation, but I spend time modifying configs or making/modifying scripts.
Hi I'm new here. What's the program in the screenshot? I wanna give that a try!
Yeah. It will be slow. Very slow for quite a while. Then it will be much nicer and faster.