Somehow it’s now April? For the last few weeks I’ve been telling myself I need to get a blog post up, and today I’m using my newly-arrived ergonomic keyboard as a motivating force to practise my typing. I backed a Kickstarter project last year and it has taken over a year for the product to arrive.
The Moergo Glove80 is a split keywell keyboard with a columnar layout, meaning the keys sit in a little bowl and are placed directly on top of each other, not staggered like on a regular keyboard. It uses a thumb cluster for the modifiers, instead of having to stretch the pinky out and hold down. It supports tenting as well so it feels great when I place my hands on the keyboard, posture-wise. But in terms of actual typing, there’s a lot to get used to. A lot of muscle memory needs to be overwritten.
The problem is less the letters, which only require minor adjustments although it turns out I am probably not touch-typing correctly, especially for the letters X, C, and V. Also Z and P are a little awkward. But the main struggle is to have to remember that I need to use my thumbs to hit backspace and space and shift, which are all in new positions.
The paragraph above took me a full twelve minutes to write, with lots of pauses and backspaces, especially on the Vs and the periods. My average typing speed went from around 110 wpm (120 on a good day) down to 30 immediately. Four days later I can get it up to 60-70 on a good session but it’s usually 40-50, which is a nightmare for work and means I can’t transition fully to the Glove80 just yet.
Wow, that was tiring. Time for a break.