Keyboarding for a Dummy (me)
Let me tell you a story.
About keyboards. (duh)
When I was a wee little child, I used to LOVE playing with the family PC. It’s where basically all of my initial technology knowledge came from, in fact. Unsurprisingly, the main means of interacting with this computer was a standard keyboard and mouse, because my parents weren’t absolute nerds. And I would LOVE to tell you that after interacting with a QWERTY keyboard for hundreds of hours, I eventually decided to learn how to touch type on it.
I didn’t. My parents tried, and I still didn’t. My teachers tried, and I STILL didn’t. I had no motivation. Why, you ask? Because even at that age, I had heard of the mythical “keyboard layouts better than QWERTY”, and my young self being, well, me, could never settle for simply learning mediocrity. Instead, I went merrily on about hunt-and-pecking at around 50 WPM. Eventually, I fell deep into the keyboard layout rabbit hole and discovered this amazing layout called “stenography”. The exact details of how it functions are a blog post for another day but suffice it to say it was fast, ergonomic, and everything anyone could ever hope for in an alternative keyboard layout. The catch? You had to learn a completely different typing paradigm.
You see, I’ve kinda been lying to you about stenography being an alternative keyboard layout. The truth is that it’s an alternative keyboard. You had to type words according to how they sound as opposed to how they’re spelled. I learned about stenography and thought, “This is it. This is the Ultimate Keyboard Layout. I have to learn this.” So I got a Multisteno and started learning it. Eventually, after a couple months, I was practically able to daily drive my own PC with it and could type at around 30 WPM! And then my keyboard problems were solved and I never had to be a geek about text input ever again.
Until my journey came to a grinding halt due to issues completely out of my control. Remember how I said stenography was ergonomic? Well, it is, with one tiny little catch that both I in this post and younger me glossed over. Its typing style is ergonomic, yes — but only if the keyboard was split.
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Somewhat inconveniently, my Multisteno was, in fact, not split. Which is why, after about a year of typing with it, every time I tried to type with it for long periods of time (like longer than 10 minutes) my hands started getting pins and needles. Which, as I learned after a couple of frantic Googles, is an early onset sign of carpal tunnel syndrome. I knew at least one of my parents had suffered from this in the past, so I knew better than to risk it just so that I could keep using the Ultimate Keyboard Layout. Sadly, this is where my steno journey had to come to a close, because I sold the Multisteno, figuring someone less inclined to repetitive strain injuries could find a good home for it.
Saddened by the loss of one of my (admittedly only) hobbies, I began desperately searching for something to fill in the void it had left. That’s when I stumbled on the most useful subset of the mechanical keyboard community, the ergonomic mechanical keyboard community. Interestingly, this is one of the only communities I know of where people have to join partly against their will, specifically because they have to type for their job and suffer from repetitive strain injuries, disabilities, and other physical ailments which prevent them from either comfortably using a standard keyboard or prevent them from even using one outright. So, emboldened by my extremely limited but still present soldering knowledge at the time, I took it upon myself to build a custom ergonomic keyboard so my steno dream could still thrive.
The first choice you have to make when building a keyboard is naturally which one you’re going to build. Now, I could have designed my own keyboard, but that felt like more effort than it was worth, especially considering the hundreds upon hundreds of options already available to choose from. Eventually, after much deliberation, I settled on the Kyria rev3 by SplitKB. I won’t go into the details of getting the parts and the actual build process of a custom keyboard, but suffice it to say it cost a lot of money and took a lot of time to make. In the end, though, I was left with my very own hand-built keyboard that I can reprogram to do whatever I please, including steno. So that’s it then, right? I made it send steno outputs and I steno-ed happily ever after?
Well, I had unfortunately overlooked a crucial part of the keyboard specifications (which probably makes sense considering I was too lazy to read them in full anyways). You see, I had built a keyboard with keys that were Cherry MX spaced. With switches that were not Cherry MX switches. I had used Choc switches, low-profile ones that were unsurprisingly smaller than a standard Cherry MX switch. And I had ordered normal Choc keycaps.
What that meant was that there were very noticeable gaps between the keys in my “steno-optimized” keyboard. And since steno required you to be able to press two keys at once for most fingers and even four keys for the right pinky, this was sadly very non-optimal. In the end, I just ended up learning Colemak-DH and being happy with that compromise. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to realize my steno dream. But not yet.
