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Comment by jeofken | Hacker News Reader

I recently broke my left hand bones, and am absolutely useless using Emacs and other tools, or even typing.

How do HN solve the problem of programming with one hand?

Check out voice programming with Talon[0], I've recently been playing around with it (to be less reliant on my hands), and it actually takes little work to get started and fairly productive.

The state of voice programming is much better than most people would imagine.

Here's a nice talk on strangeloop by a person who switched to it permanently: https://youtu.be/YKuRkGkf5HU

[0]: https://talonvoice.com/

Not quite the complete solution maybe, but I have been using split keyboard (Sinc, Quefrency) for a long time and have been lately drifting towards making each half somewhat independent by using layers/ modifier keys. I am more focused on left hand, but I thought maybe it could be adapted for the right.

You don’t need a special Keybaord to try it out, can just used Karabiner Elements (OSX) or Autohotkey (Windows). Lmk if you’d want some template scripts for either, happy to share them with you.

I have Caps mapped to Layer-1 which allow me to do CAPS (pinky)+ WSAD (arrows), g(backspace), we (PGup, PGdn), z (enter).

Now I don’t want to reach for number keys from [7] to = and I just map them to CAPS + 123456.

Recently i realized that I often have reach for the letter keys on the second half (y, n for example for notification windows), so I remapped some letters to those.

I am thinking of actually drawing up a layout which will allow me to use the sides interchangeably but still need to figure out which Modifier key to use, that could be as convenient to press with the pinky as Capslock.

For the right side I assume it could be same or, possibly even somewhat easier since, depending on the keyboard you’d have more keys reachable with a pinky to experiment with.

Alternatively, if you dislike this pinky-centric approach or feel like you’d want to use all the fingers for typing, you could possibly do the same but with a foot pedal as a modifier / layer switcher. I suppose if I was to find myself in a situation where I have to type with just one hand, I’d look into the pedals that can send HID commands (to keep things simple for OS) or even get a couple of those jumbo mechanical keyboard switches and use them as foot-actuated modifiers / layer switchers.

I added foot pedals to the keyboard I built so I could do hold/tap modifiers with my feet. They were command and shift on hold, enter and tab on tap. I imagine you'd want one to be control for emacs. The problem is if you can't type right now I'm not sure you can solder. Sorry friend.

I was actually wondering how often people do this. Did you do this because of some kind of injury or in pursuit of ergonomics / out of curiosity?

If the latter, how would you say this affected your workflow? In terms of typing speed, overall enjoyment, fatigue, or any other metric of productivity or comfort?

I use a foot pedal with my Kinesis Advantage2. I use one pedal for the Advantage's Fn layer and one for shift. I don't use the Fn layer that much (mainly to reach ESC or use the numpad), but of course I use shift a lot. I did it for ergonomics and love it, would never go back. Although sometimes I get lazy and don't use it, especially if I'm tired or just messing around (as opposed to working).

There's a third pedal too but I've never mapped it to anything. Even after a few years, I haven't found anything I wanted to use it for. Maybe something like Control would be good, but I've got that on a thumb cluster button so its not really necessary.

Kind of curiosity. I wanted to give it a shot because the keys in the bottom corner of the keyboard were, I felt, kind of wasted since they are kind of hard to reach. But I don't always keep my feet in the same place so moving my whole foot back into position to hit shift was a little ridiculous. And I ended up with redundant command keys elsewhere on the keyboard that I used way more often. So it wasn't a huge win for me tbqh.

All of that was on a Let's Split[0] which is a split keyboard where each side is a 4x6 grid. I liked it pretty well but I knew I wanted to try a vertical stagger so I changed to an Iris[1]. Since the two halves are connected over I2C I thought I could maybe add a "third half" with a bunch of pedals connected, but I kind of lost interest when I found that just using my hands was so much more pleasant with this keyboard.

[0] https://keeb.io/products/levinson-lets-split-w-led-backlight

[1] https://keeb.io/collections/frontpage/products/iris-keyboard...

I'm sorry to hear about your accident! The Matias Half Keyboard https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/ provides a one-handed keyboard that works very similarly to a conventional two-handed keyboard. It's a system that ought to be possible to replicate on a conventional board using AutoHotKey or on a custom-built board. I've never yet tried one myself though.

The Twiddler, maybe? https://twiddler.tekgear.com/

Dvorak also designed left and right handed keyboards [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout#One-han...

https://www.tapwithus.com/ tapstrap2

If it's an option at all I would take a break from it while recovering.

for a zero hardware investment solution, you could try a keymap that uses a key to mirror the halves of your keyboard

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