the golden touch

[petef]

At work, they stock a bunch of ergonomic keyboards and will reimburse the purchase of any keyboard you want (within reason; not sure what the exact limits are) - the same goes for mice too, of course.

One keyboard they stock got my attention: the Goldtouch Keyboard. It splits in the middle and has both vertical and horizontal split/raise

Comments

[codepoet]

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble wiht ergonomic keyboards - I taught myself to type at a young age, and never "correctly", so keyboards like that generally serve to annoy me greatly.

(I probably could, except my left hand reaches a bit too far over - if H was on the the left side of the keyboard, I would probably be able to deal with them a lot better.... Except for the part about how I wouldn't be able to type at decent speed with only my left hand.)

[petef]

Luckily I had a copy of mavis beacon when I was young, so I ended up learning to type pretty well.

Yeah, one-handed typing (no comments) is almost impossible with this split keyboard (mostly because of the vertical-ness), but that just means I force myself to take a break while eating/drinking.

*blink*

[codepoet]

Dude! I'd so buy that mouse if it wasn't $60.

Re: *blink*

[petef]

slightly cheaper.

Re: *blink*

[codepoet]

Better, but I'm fairly happy with my Logitech track-ball, and it's hard to justify buying a lot of cheaper thinga than that.

[syntaxpc]

For a keyboard, a tonne of people I know uses a Kinesis. When I broke into Google a couple years back, I saw that either Brin or Page uses one (they share an office and one of them had a Kinesis). The kinesis supports programmable macros (stored in the keyboard; not in the driver). You can also get ergonomic foot pedals. If you use vi(m), just bind a foot pedal to escape. if you use Emacs, bind them to ctrl and meta. For strictly aesthetics, I might also suggest the Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional with blanked keys. Finally, remember by wearable computer? Well, there's a relatively new version of the Twiddler.

[petef]

Yeah, there are a lot of people around here that have a Kinesis. I tried typing on a few, but it didn't make my hands happy like the Goldtouch did. But, the foot pedals are pretty freaking sweet, though. I used to use hhkb's exclusively (still have a couple at home), but I don't find them to be nearly as ergonomic (but good key response).