Charachorder

I learned Dvorak on a Matias Half Keyboard, skeptical of their brain mirror theory, then tried it out of curiousity on a full keyboard one day. My other hand just knew. A few years later, I switched back to QWERTY. Optimizing the alphabet isn't the bottleneck.

I owned a FingerWorks TouchStream keyboard, before the company was sold to Apple to become the foundation of their gesture interfaces. I never got the hang of no tactile feedback, and sold it at cost, a mistake. They're now valuable collector's items.

I used to use three Kinesis Advantage sculpted ergonomic keyboards. Their internal electronics was dated and unstable; I gave up. I recently went way down the mechanical/ergonomic rabbit hole, trying designs such as the Ergodox EZ, Planck EZ, GergoPlex, and various more standard 65% designs with a variety of switch choices. Then I tried a Topre rubber dome keyboard. They're called "endgame" for a reason: They're obsession killers. They're indisputably a better feel than any mechanical switch, and there's nothing one can to do customize the hardware. No more forum pictures of your pretty keycaps because you can't follow the seminar talk on lubing stems. Just learn to type better.

So I bought four Leopold FC660C Topre Silent 45g keyboards, and Hasu replacement controllers supporting QMK and related custom firmware. Colorful keycaps is high school obsession. O-Rings and lubing stems is taking electives in college. Actually redesigning the keyboard firmware is studying algebraic geometry in grad school. THAT is a black hole. Astonishingly deep open-source community, under the radar for most people.

My QMK layout is in perpetual progress (there's an unused layer). My fingers rarely leave the 12 keys near home row for each hand. 9 keys for each hand are mirrors of tap/hold keys, command/option/control/shift or select a custom layer when held, or usual key when tapped. This is an inconceivably effective advance for me, I can never imagine going back. I control all automation tools (Alfred scripts, window management) and control-xylophone program interaction, using a single finger from each hand. This is the sweet spot for effective cording, and a quadratic expansion in expressiveness over single finger typing. I'm stunned this hasn't been the standard since computers were invented, but we're creatures of habit. We still imagine we're using typewriters. What cripples the CharaChorder is that you can't walk up to it with a glass of wine in one hand, and figure out quickly how to mute the speakers, or pause the YouTube video, or page-down in a browser. It's only useful once you are firmly "in the saddle". Even then, it's tuned for speed records typing language text, at the complete expense of practical use for programming or program control. I switched back from Dvorak to QWERTY because layout for language typing is SO irrelevant to what we do.

My tap/hold layout has the peripheral keys still available, for reaching in with the hand that isn't holding a glass of wine.