Here’s the thing, even on mushy silicon dome keys, people rarely bottom out. It’s supposed to be bad because if you push hard on the table…it pushes hard back which means a lot of stress. The premise for mechanical keys helping with RSI is that their feedback helps you not press your keys so far down your fingers are effectively pressing against the table (called bottoming out). This blew my mind: not one person said mechanical keys helped them, and one person said they might’ve made it worse. If I were to, I’d first learn emacs, use emacs for everything, and then learn Dvorak. Personally, I use vim for everything and dvorak ruins the home row of hjkl, so I haven’t learned dvorak. 10% is good, but nothing compared to RSI. A few people I talked to mentioned using Dvorak also helped reduce RSI symptoms and increased their speed by ~10%. Unlike qwerty which is an accident of history, Dvorak was designed for fast typing (but not RSI reduction). The Dvorak keyboard layout is an overhaul of your entire keyboard layout.
Fast typing mac#
The build in key remapper on mac and linux is not up to task.
Fast typing software#
You’ll need to use more advanced software however.
Fast typing windows#
You should pick the modifier key that works for you (on linux the windows button doesn’t do much), but use standard conventions for the letters you remap to.
To reduce the stress, I remapped them to Windows + HJKL for arrow keys (like vim) and Windows + A for home and Windows + E for end (like emacs). I find the only keys I regularly stretch for are the arrow keys and home/end. Moving your hand and stretching is a big stress. Windows: SharpKeys Advanced: Remap Arrow Keys and Home/End Linux: It’s built in on Ubuntu, and for advanced users there is Xmodmap Remapping caps lock is quite easy, each OS has an easy to use tool for this. Alternatively if you use vim a lot or you’re using a Kinesis which has ctrl under the thumbs but strangely not escape, you can save your hand from stretching (stressing) to reach escape and bring escape closer. Save your left pinky some stress and bring Ctrl closer by remapping caps lock to ctrl.
If you’re a programmer, and especially if you use emacs, you use the Ctrl key all of the time. Remap CapsLock to Ctrl (or Escape)ĬapsLock is useless, unless you’re Khassaki. Similarly if you have a normal keyboard which has little feet in the back, these create positive tilt which is very stressful on your wrists. I solved this by going to a nearby plastics shop and had them build a custom stand for me which worked well. The kinesis advantage2, however, does not. The Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 has a built in stand for negative tilt. I also found raising the front of the keyboard so the keyboard points downwards helps with my RSI. Sure it’s more expensive than most keyboards, but you’ll type faster and pay fewer medical bills, so it’s a fantastic investment. Kinesis pulls out all of the stops on this keyboard. The gold standard for ergonomic keyboards. Although Microsoft is mostly a software company, they did serious ergonomics research back in the day and came out with this. If money is tight or you’re not sure if a split tent layout works for you, Microsoft makes an entry level version. When I had pain, and I tried this keyboard, it went away on the spot. There’s two off the shelf keyboards I recommend that have a split, tented, layout. If you’re worried about it when friends are over, then save the keyboard for when nobody’s looking. If you’re worried about a dorky looking keyboard at work, don’t, people take RSI seriously. Even if you don’t have RSI, it will delay the onset. This change alone almost fixed my RSI and it’s fixed others. If you make one change to your keyboard layout, make it split (there’s a gap in the middle) and tented (the middle is elevated higher than the ends). Layout changes that may reduce RSI Split and tent In the long term, the severity of your RSI dominates your typing speed. RSI dominates typing speed in the long term Maybe you can’t put off RSI forever, but every day you’re not in pain is a faster day than one in pain.
Fast typing how to#
Following the advice of this post, we’ll see how to delay and mitigate this. Only when I found the right keyboard layout (seriously) could I type somewhat normally. I paced my typing, even if my ideas claimored to get into the code. I took breaks, watching the clock until I could to get back to coding. I didn’t even know until I asked them! Me? I was 24 when it struck. RSI, the silent cripplerĪlmost every serious programmer I interviewed painfully developed RSI in their 20s. What matters? RSI, Repetitive Stress Injury. I thought wpm would be the metric to determine the fastest keyboard layout.
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