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I still think that what’s even sillier than QWERTY is the fact that the keys are angled up to the left on both sides. Sure this (sort of) makes sense for your right hand, but the left hand does not naturally fit the keys going in that direction.

I’ve considered moving to an ortholinear split keyboard [1] for this reason, but it seems like I’m so used to the “broken” way that it would take too long to retrain muscle memory at this point. The other downside is readjusting when needing to use a laptop keyboard.

I’m just ranting that they didn’t do standardize on something that made more sense a long time ago, instead of everyone being so locked into the broken way that there’s no going back at this point.

[1] https://ergodox-ez.com/

3 comments

The keyboard keys are staggered for historical reasons [1]. I always found it awkward moving my fingers diagonally instead of vertically. My typing experience improved dramatically moving to an ortholinear keyboard [2]. It helped my pinky RSI as well with the modifiers being on the thumb clusters.

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/40390/why-are-keyboar...

[2] https://kinesis-ergo.com/shop/adv360pro/

I built a Dactyl style keyboard with a trackball on one side. It's split, ortholinear, and also "scooped". To be honest it took me a while to adjust but it was worth it. Switching back to the laptop keyboard is almost entirely a non issue—that muscle memory runs deep.

While I was at it I also tried learning Colmak but didn't stick with it. This flip layout seems worth a try for the low learning overhead.

The ortholinearity is learnt extremely fast, less than a week. Do not worry about it. What takes time is the layout change.

This from my experience with a typematrix keyboard together with the daily use of a normal laptop keyboard.