Dec 18 2020Landing on the Moon

The words you are reading have been typed at half my usual speed from a new keyboard, delivered around twelve hours ago.

I started making some changes to the default configuration pretty much immediately and I want to describe the reasoning behind these changes:

As a German, the first thing you will want to do is switch to a configuration that supports German keys. Especially the symbol keys need swapping out. While you could instead just change layouts on your system, I do prefer just simply having everything work as expected plug-and-play after maybe a more cumbersome inital configuration.

Furthermore, number keys do not count as numpad keys. Especially, if you use Blender, you will want to correct these on the default configuration.

A week later

Now typing at roughtly 90% of my usual typing speed (50-60 WPM instead of ~70 WPM).

Coding is still somewhat frustrating, but various typing websites helped me get my speed back up to something bareable for communication, email, blogging, …

I think one of the things potentially leading to various carpal tunnel issues I have had in the past was that I wasn’t using 5 fingers for typing! While I learned the usual 10-finger typing technique as a kid, I found it too cumbersome and developed my own technique which is mostly based on the index and middle fingers.

This technique had the advantage of being context-aware. Hence depending on which key I pressed previously, a different finger or even hand might be pressing the next key, if it were more conveniently reached by it.

Disadvantage was a very frequent rotation of the ankle to reach e.g. Q, Y/Z etc with middle or index fingers. That together with the counter rotation for German symbol keys (mostlyy Shift with a number) represented heavy strain on the wrist tendons.

Through trying to find excercises to speed up my typing I found that people typing at 170+ WPM all use all fingers. Hence I started forcing myself to do the same. Kind of felt like relearning typing all over, but I’m confident that I will eventually out-type my old self.

I still struggle with various system shortcuts, though, the muscle memory there is harder to redirect.

Overall impression

The Moonlander feels very high quality. Going back to my old keyboard feels very strange. This is probably alone through now being fully mechanical while the previous was a mecha-membrane hybrid.

The reconfiguration is pretty fun and while there’s still a lot of potential, the idea of effortlessly being able to type all symbols needed for programming amazes me.

Thumb Pads

One of the issues I found was that you have decision to make between reaching the thumb keys conveniently and tenting the keyboard:

If you have smaller hands, it is recommended to tent the thumb-pad upwards, but that makes the keyboard very unstable if you tent it in any way. The higher you tent the farther away the thumb keys are.

Initially I had wanted to tent it all the way for best blood flow throught the wrist (similar to why you’d want to have a vertical mouse), but that meant that one of the four keys for each thumb was not within reach and one was only reachable with quite some effort. Now I settled for a compromise: Slight tenting that allows me to reach all of the keys, but one of them only with great effort.