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Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

> One week or so ago I switched from Colemak to typing on QWYRFM due to the reduced load it places on the pinkies.

I typed Dvorak for 10 years before I started getting RSI again in my right ulna. It turns out that the 'S' key being hit by the pinky in Dvorak caused me a lot of pain.

I ended up switching to BEAKL, a pretty obscure layout which is specifically made to alleviate stress on the pinky. It moves the relatively common S key to the right hand pointer finger, for instance.

It turns out that the theory underpinning the dvorak layout assumes that homerow hits are strictly better than upper and lower row, but the pinky and ring finger are such weak fingers that it's often better to move the index or middle fingers up or down a row than hit a key on the home row with the pinky.

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A friend of mine used his pinky and ring finger to open the door of his pickup truck. But it was frozen shut and he snapped the tendons (ligaments?) and that was that, he couldn't curl them shut on his hand anymore.

What? Did he not go to the doctor? That's a fairly straightforward surgery to repair even though the recovery and therapy sucks.

It's way easier to repair a "snap" than a "slice". However, you do have to get to the surgeon before 14 days are up because everything starts shrinking immediately. If you don't, then they have to graft a piece of vestigial tendon from your arm (apparently about 85% of people have it) to make up the length.

I really like it when they put spare parts directly into the product.

Surely that heals after a few months? I tried opening our shower door which magnetically attracts and seals the glass doors together with my pinky, I wasn't prepared for the amount of force required to open so I got sharp pain and had problems doing anything with my finger. Luckily it only lasted a day. Reading this I didn't think it could've gone this bad.

> but the pinky and ring finger are such weak fingers that it's often better to move the index or middle fingers up or down a row than hit a key on the home row with the pinky.

Spot on, I would go as far as saying that using the pinky at all is poor technique because it indicates one reaches keys by stretching the fingers, rather than hovering the hand over the keyboard, allowing each finger to remain in its natural position, and using only the fingers that are naturally strong and precise.

That’s interesting. I guess I never really thought about it, but on dvorak `ls` is a double tap with the right pinky, and it’s often immediately followed by [enter] with the same pinky… I type that key sequence a lot

Highly recommend you look into keyboards that have "Enter" and "Backspace" reachable by thumb/index fingers. I've been dailying a TECK for nearly a decade, and it's helped immensely with RSI.

Their new Clevo keyboard is a bit different, so can't vouch for it, but my SO likes it so far as first foray into ergo keyboards: https://trulyergonomic.com/

Plover[1] and stenography has come up occasionally on HN, but I haven't seen anyone say they've given it a serious try.

I keep feeling like it would be good for emails and documentation, if not code. More text for fewer keypresses.

[1] http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

I would really want to try that, but it seems extremely tied to the language. for English that's cool, but I write code, greeklish (Greek with English characters) and English daily. That means that for these three I would need to configure things and that seems like waaaaay to high of an up front investment for a trial.

I used some generation of Truly Ergonomic for a few years and it started getting repeating/missing characters... at $250 it was too big of an expense for me to rebuy. While it worked though, I was very happy with it

My impression was that they used some slightly chattery Cherry MX keyswitches combined with a controller with a poor debounce routine. (The electrical output of many switches "bounces" quickly on and off a few times when changing states. This can cause dropped or doubled key presses if not accounted for by the keyboard controller.) I’m not sure if the batches of Cherry MX switches they had were bad, or if some amount of chatter is inevitable given the switch design.

From their marketing it looks like they have changed to (Kailh-made?) switches that use a light sensor instead of an electrical contact. https://trulyergonomic.com/ergonomic-keyboards/best-truly-er...

I guess that’s one alternative to implementing a better debounce routine.

You should try the ergodox. I similarly bought the TECK because I wanted an ergonomic keyboard with a standard-ish layout and loved it, but it died in a couple of years. After that I bought an Ergodox EZ and have been very happy with it.

You don't use your ring finger for l?

No, but thinking about it that would make sense. Is that considered the correct posture? I’ve always used my pinky finger for L and ?

I added

  alias h=ls
  alias hh='ls -l'

to my .zshrc about 10 minutes after I started using Dvorak, 18 years ago. "ls" on its own is OK. It's not an especially common bigram (wails, fills, also, Welsh, whilst), but I can't find any English word matching ls[rlvz], which is the pattern of "ls -l". Compulsive, compulsory, falser, impulsive, maelstrom, pulsar, wellspring come closest.

I believe LSZ is all with the pinky in the usual method[1]. There's no other option on the keyboard I bought a couple of years ago, which also has several thumb keys.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Dvorak_keyboard_l...

[2] https://imgur.com/gallery/UIZ8Jz3

I fixed my one case of budding RSI with Two Weird Tricks.

The important one was to make my home row on laptop and other 'standard' keyboard layouts into (approximately) QSDV-POKJ. That is to say, my palms are angled relative to the keyboard angle. Without this, the wrists are squished the whole time one is typing: that's bad and no layout can fix it, it's pure posture.

The other one was to move backspace to the cap's lock position. Turns out I delete a lot and i was doing it with a rather extreme wrist rotation and my pinky finger.

I use an ErgoDox when I can these days, but can easily spend an hour or two typing on a laptop keyboard, my spine needs a break well before my wrists would.

Interesting. I use Dvorak too and find it much easier than qwerty. But I have been wondering about that right pinky. I broke mine when I was much younger (skulls are harder than knuckles, kids). I guess I will try your BEAKL suggestion.

Thanks for sharing this. As a Dvorak typist of 6 years, I have often wondered what my next frontier will be. Stenography seems to have a fast growing community around it, but I'm open to alternative layouts as well. BEAKL has always been on the edge of my radar holding the position of interesting, but probably no. This however is the first time I've seen someone compare it favorably to Dvorak. Seems it could be worth trying out based on what you said! While I feel like Dvorak has strengthened my right pinky finger, it's L, /, and = keys are notably tedious. I wouldn't want to have RSI as a result of that.

Did you ever try Colemak? I've been Colemak for probably 5 years now, I can't speak to pinkie specific pain but I get much less tired on long typing sessions. It's interesting to me how everyone seems to know of Dvorak over Colemak. But I never heard of BEAKL, thanks. For me the issue with Dvorak was that I wasn't ready to give up my function keys (control x, c).

I haven't, just went straight to dvorak. Afaik Colemak has less intense right pinky usage but more same-hand rolls.

Losing the function keys is a pain, on MacOS you can use Dvorak-Qwerty which retains them, on my new keyboard I just have a new "command" layer which retains the old positions.

I used BEAKL as well for a few months but in combination with a 5-column split keyboard (so you don't press enter, shift etc with your pinky) there was too little for my pinky to do (which caused other fingers to do more than needed).

Of others have similar issues I would recommend you to look at a split keyboard first (but switching layout is great too).

What is a good Mac-layout split keyboard with USB?

No need for anything Mac specific. Just get a programmable keyboard and you can swap Ctrl and Cmd and you're good.

Tons of alternatives here: https://jhelvy.shinyapps.io/splitkbcompare/

That's interesting, I do type on split ortholinear keyboards (e.g. corne variant) so maybe I'll run into that soon. My right hand pinky is pretty bad with flare-ups so it would be a welcome break for me

Interesting. I've never trained or practiced my typing, but I've always naturally typed using only my thumb, pointer and middle finger, no pinky or ring fingers at all, but still manage to hit 80-100WPM without them on QWERTY. Good instincts I guess.

This sounds wild and frankly I don't believe you.

There was some research that showed people who typed with fewer fingers could be just as fast. However, I am surprised that anyone could achieve 100wpm with no training.

What do you mean by "training"?

I've never done a ten finger / touch typing course or something like that (so, no training) and don't have problems typing 130 WPM 98-100% accuracy in one of these typing tests without specifically practicing typing tests. I don't have ten working fingers.

Training yourself by intentionally practicing touch typing.

I think the difference is these people need to be constantly looking at the keyboard, as they depend on the letters printed over the keys.

But yes, they can be fast in short bursts.

100% touch typing here, no looking.

So small caveats, I lied a little. This is the first time I've ever really sat down and analyzed my typing. I do use my ring fingers slightly, on my left hand I use my ring finger for "z" "a" and "q" exclusively, and on my right hand I use the ring finger for backspace exclusively. I also only use my left thumb to hit the space bar and use my right index finger for space when my left thumb isn't available, and don't use my right thumb at all.

I managed to hit 93WPM(really 102WPM if you look, it wouldn't continue until I finished the last word which I didn't notice for quite a few seconds lowering the final time) my first try while holding my phone in my mouth which was a little distracting to be honest, and after about 10 minutes of warming up and not holding the phone managed to get it to 132WPM.

First try at 93WPM - https://gfycat.com/groundedpettyeider Had to cut it to 60 seconds to fit into gfycat, so it starts a little into me already typing but gets the idea across

Last try getting to 132WPM - https://i.imgur.com/r2ecd1Z.png

Impressive, I stand corrected. Definitely stand by it being wild though, lol.

I would love to see a video.

First try at 93WPM - https://gfycat.com/groundedpettyeider Had to cut it to 60 seconds to fit into gfycat, so it starts a little into me already typing but gets the idea across

Last try getting to 132WPM - https://i.imgur.com/r2ecd1Z.png

I just use query, but I only type with 3 fingers on each hand and move my hand if I need to. I've always felt holding my hands rigidly over the keyboard was going to give me rsi no matter what the layout.

I self taught myself to type and so don't really follow whatever is "proper" technique, so with WASD I tend to use my left pinky for SHIFT and nothing else.

This is surprisingly common. WASD-biased finger positioning. Also if you only use left shift it reinforces the habit since your pinky is what would normally press the a key. If you ever fix your typing technique (or just get curious), ESDF (instead of WASD) kinda fixes this. Your same fingers handle movement, but while also using proper homerow, and you free up space left on the movement keys where you could move stuff that was on ctrl and shift to the letters. (talking about the in-game key bindings here)

A few years ago I relearned qwerty with proper homerow, started using right shift, etc. I then later switched to Dvorak and then Workman. If I ever play a game I now set up the equivalent to qwerty ESDF in the controls, but with the letters of my layout. I sometimes also set backspace to jump instead of space because I use a split keyboard where I placed my space key on the right half thumb cluster and my right hand is on the mouse for games like Minetest and Xonotic.

I wonder if changing your keyboard to use lighter switches is another way to alleviate that

It helps, my latest keyboard uses 25g linear choc switches (so low travel too).

I've tried the trendy heavy 60+g springs and I tend to get fatigued.

I switch S and V on my Dvorak keyboard.

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