Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Keyboarding rant

I got an ergonomic keyboard today, because of my recent wrist injury (more on that later), it's one of those split type keyboards which look weird but I already like it better.

However, some of the keys are in slightly different spots - Home, End, Page up and Page down are organized differently, and the arrow keys are in a plus-sign configuration and not an upside down T like they usually are.

For those of us who develop muscle memory after years of typing, I wish keyboard makers would LEAVE THESE BUTTONS ALONE! I have another keyboard at home which is all bluetooth and fancy, but has reorganized keys, and so it sits next to the computer on the tv, hardly used, and the one I use is the play old non-fancy one.

Also, as a side note, typing with a cast on is doable, but my fat cast thumb keeps bumping the space bar. It's interesting that people think that my job involves a lot of typing - certainly I do type a lot, but it's not like data entry - programming is a lot of thinking, and the amount of typing is actually minimal. There are many people here that still hunt and peck and more/less get by (it does slow down IM chats a bit but sometimes those people just use the old fashioned phone :) So my cast has slowed me down to about 50-60 wpm, but it doesn't hamper my work progress :)

1 comment:

Eric said...

I understand your aggravation on moving keys around. I have an older MS ergonomic keyboard which I really like, with one exception. On most keyboards the function keys are grouped in three groups of four keys. On my ergonomic keyboard they're grouped into two groups of five, and one group of two. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but in Windows you hit Alt-F4 (last button in the first group of function keys) to close an application. On mine you wind up hitting F5.