Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
I put brackets as combos of pointing and middle finger.
On the left half the homerow combo is for (. On the right half, it’s for ).
And the other symbols are on a layer. I optimized it it to make common programming symbols easy to type.
And I found that practicing typing quickly on speedcoder.com really helped me.
At first you have to think about what key to press to switch the layer and then what key to press to get true symbol you need.
But after a while, your brain learns the combination of movements.
So you just express the intention of a symbol and your fingers execute the symbol.