kasia in a nutshell

Ask talks about keyboards and key remapping. This is really a topic dear to my heart.

I'm a unix programmer. I do most of my work in emacs (rest in xterms) and that means I use the ctrl key quite heavily. In my previous job I was lucky enough to have my own Sun machine with the properly placed ctrl key (where the caps lock is on the PC keyboard). Not so much luck in this job. I have a pc (yuck, yuck) which I basically just use as a dumb terminal and make an XDMCP connection to a Sun eserver and work on that (open windows, teehee).

When I first started working here I started to have pains in my left hand. This is scary to someone who types for a living.. if I can't type, I can't program. Turns out the culprit was the incredibly bad design of a PC keyboard. Think about it, which key do you use more often, the caps lock or the control key? Who in their right mind would put a key that's used heavily in a position that is awkward to reach when touch typing and causes the little finger to be twisted in an unnatural manner. I've remapped my keys (Ask has directions on how to do that in his entry) no pain ever since... (my computer at home has had remapped keys for years).

These keyboards look pretty good.. unfortunately I never had any luck getting used to an ergonomic keyboard. I can type really fast, but not on one of those keyboards.. can't quite figure out why that is.

Now the happy hacking keyboard is what I really want to get.. Too bad I can't quite justify spending that much money on a keyboard just now..