The art of the desk setup (2021)
arun.is
arun.is
I used to obsess over things like "good design", minimalism, perfectionism, etc. Since I stopped obsessing, I feel better: less stress, fewer expectations from my environment, better focus on what I need to accomplish (rather than by what tools) etc. Don't get me wrong, I still clean out my desk once in a couple of days, but am no longer distracted by small stuff every minute. For e.g., I love a good mechanical keyboard and bought one a few years ago and never looked back. I am happy with this keyboard and will use it until it breaks down. I love fountain pens and bought one 7 years ago, and now I don't think about pens anymore. Not that I do not care about a good pen or a good keyboard, but because I am happy with what I've got.
Whether that makes me a deadened robot, or even marginally more effective than the next guy, is of course not entirely clear. It's just a compulsion. But the point is that people who are fastidiously tidy with their workdesks aren't mythical unicorns, but everyday people.
Being paperless, having a nearby bin, using regular cups (as opposed to disposables), and storage for things like extra usb cables, batteries, usb keys, stylus, etc; isn't hard to achieve (paperless being role dependent of course) and makes a huge difference
It's all so ephemeral. The Macbook du jour. The thinnest screen you can get. Designer mice. Trying to get some kind of individuality with allusions of ergonomics with a more specific mechanical keyboard.
That's "creativity flowing in the air"?
FWIW, I used to have a nice remote office setup and still found myself wanting to run away from it (to a library or coffee shop) to meet a form of Marchetti's constant ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant ), and started going down the rabbit hole of https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers
I mean its tiny and cool at all, but unless you're actively moving from place to place with it you're sacrificing a lot of typing convenience for nothing (other than aesthetics I guess).
You want to go tkl and pull out your number pad when/if you need it more power to you, but anything smaller than that and your working against yourself in my eyes.
That varies quite a bit between individuals. Doing native mobile dev work under macOS, I can count the number of times I need an F-key in an entire month on a single hand. They don't get used anywhere near enough to need their own row.
That said the presence of an F-row doesn't bother me — it's not as if they're hurting anything by being there — but there are no keyboards with both an F-row and my preferred layout (the HHKB/Tsangan variant of 60%) so few of my keyboards have F-rows.
I'd put it the other way: if you have a keyboard where all your thumb can do is press the spacebar, you're much more limited compared to if each thumb can hit 2-3 keys.
With keyboards with 2-3 thumb keys each, suddenly it's possible to use layers to bring many keys to within easy reach of the hand. -- On a standard keyboard, you'd either have to reach or move your hand to hit the ` key; whereas with layers, no hand movement/stretching is required.
Layering trades-off hand movement / stretching, at the cost of being more complicated to use. (Not having to stretch your fingers is an increase in comfort).
The only real downside to small-keyboards-with-thumbkeys I've experienced is for one-hand-on-keyboard usage; e.g. FPS games pretty much need to have a number row. Though, I could do CAD okay without a number row (e.g. by using a numpad layer).
Why optimize for just the desk? I like to move around to change things up sometimes.
(I do take advantage of things when I'm at the desk by having a mechanical keyboard... but it's a kinesis with more keys than a laptop, not fewer.)
Here's a third reason, based on personal experience (n=1): chording actually creates more strain on your hand/wrists than single keystrokes
Probably because most people spend a significant part of their day at the desk so it makes sense to optimize your workflow for that. Adapting to using two different keyboard layouts is awkward but not that difficult if you do both enough. If you don't do both enough for it to become easy then you're not using one of them enough for it to matter that it's awkward to swap. Making your primary workflow significantly less efficient for the sake of the edge case doesn't make sense.
For someone like you that likes to move around a lot, you're optimizing with different criteria in mind.
:o) This is less of a disadvantage for small keyboards. It's easier to move a small keyboard around than a big keyboard.
I don't like laying a keyboard directly over the keys, but I was able to get away with lasercutting a plate with some bumpons; and a cable to accommodate seating the keyboard closer to the screen: https://rgoulter.com/blog/posts/programming/2022-08-24-trave...
For these younger people, the numpad and navigation keys are an impediment to reaching the mouse. For me it’s the opposite: the navigation keys is how I normally navigate (outside of vi controls) and the numpad is for numbers. The mouse is the input device of last resort.
This is the case for me. I grew up with Macs with full keyboards through the 90s and early 00s, but the Fkeys rarely got used and so they don't get much traffic from me now either.
The mouse, the navigation cluster, and the number pad all require you to remove your hands from the home keys position in order to use them. Many of these smaller layout keyboards facilitate accessing these and the function keys under layers. I have several of these layer toggles on alpha keys, including the ones on the home row.
The question then is does the chorded key offer more utility than a discrete physical one but requires you to move your arms away from home position? I think in many cases the answer is yes, it does, and it's not simply about aesthetics. It's more efficient keyboarding in most circumstances.
Its weakness of course is in situations where accessing keys is time sensitive. The most obvious case where chording is strictly worse than discrete keys is gaming, where you need to be able to press various buttons quickly and often in very quick succession. In most other standard computing tasks where you're primarily typing, that isn't a meaningful consideration.
I’ve never liked chords as long as I can remember, so it seems more of a natural preference than a result of efficiency. I often get the various key combinations, but linear workflows are easy for me (e.g. :line number). In a sense, moving my hand to the navigation keys becomes ‘navigation mode’ and moving my hand to the numpad becomes ‘accounting mode’. I think I am also more sensitive to strain as I prefer trackballs over mice and trackpads. Laptops are particular rough for me. I can’t imagine sitting on a couch with just a Macbook Pro all day. Many of my colleagues are fine with that!
I agree that on a non-programmable, standard layout keyboard, chords are going to be uncomfortable. The most strain I use for chording currently is with the shift key, though. I can access the other layers and even modifiers on much easier to access keys. My keyboard also has a thumb cluster which vastly improves the chording experience. I can activate layers using my thumb so there is no additional strain on accessing them. For example, to access navigation arrows, I hold the "backspace" key down, which is a key on my left thumb cluster, and then press hjkl with my right hand. There's another layer that converts the right side of my keyboard into a number pad. I also have modifier keys sitting on my home row keys (shift, alt/option, cmd/super, ctrl has its own dedicated key in my left thumb cluster, though it also sits on the home row). What is the "caps lock" key on most keyboards serves as an "escape" key when tapped and when I hold it down it activates all four modifier keys, colloquially known as the "hyper" key, which I use for global shortcuts. There's a ton of functionality that makes using the computer itself easier and reduces the need to use the mouse.
> I much prefer modal solutions and sensible use of navigation keys when the right hand isn’t doing much typing (my work is not just typing/programming, and I do a tremendous amount of number entry, so both the navigation cluster and numpad see a lot of use). I am a vim user after all.
I've been using weird split keyboard layouts for a long time now. I don't do a ton of number entry. I think if you are then it does make sense to use a number pad, but I also think that the number of people that think they need a number pad is much greater than the number of people that actually do. Not suggesting that's the case for you, it's just been my personal observation. I would prefer a modal solution as well, but that would require a complete rethinking at the operating system level, which is more than I personally am capable of taking on. You can assign a key to toggle a layer in QMK/ZMK, though, so you could actually get that more closely analogs vim. But to create a very good experience, you'd need a keyboard that is talking to the computer and is aware of states all over the computer.
> I think I am also more sensitive to strain as I prefer trackballs over mice and trackpads. Laptops are particular rough for me. I can’t imagine sitting on a couch with just a Macbook Pro all day. Many of my colleagues are fine with that!
In my experience, ergonomics is more about balancing wear, like rotating tires, than it is to stop strain entirely. I like finger trackballs a lot, but thumb trackballs put too much strain in the wrong place. I can't sit on a couch and use a macbook pro at all, either, so I can certainly empathize. I envy those people a lot.
Not everyone has the capacity to think in the same way you do.
I would say, however, that it's not really about capacity to think a certain way. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you learned vi after learning some other editing paradigm, which you also had to learn how to do. In both cases, it's not a matter of capacity to think in a certain way, it's simply a matter of learning and then practicing.
Again, I am not suggesting that you should even do that. I would not suggest learning vi to most people, either, even though I think it's a better way to edit text. But I do think it's a better way to use a keyboard, so I will say so.
It's tempting to blame the tools, but it's more rational to blame myself. I'm not certain how to describe what the problem is, but I think capacity to think in whatever paradigm the application expects is good enough to express the point.
In almost 15 years of programming, I can't think of a single time where the marginal theoretical efficiency gains were worth more than being able to one handedly type in a TOTP code on a numpad while drinking coffee with my other hand, or my co workers being able to navigate on my computer for 5-10 minutes to show me something only they understand from 10 years ago that still has a "TODO talk to Jon" comment.
> In most other standard computing tasks where you're primarily typing
The only computing task where I'm primarily typing is when I'm practicing typing. When I'm actively writing code, I'm primarily thinking, planning, and transcribing. When I'm reading code, I'm semantically navigating. When I'm taking notes, writing documentation or responding to communication, again I'm not primarily typing I'm composing. As someone who can touch type to a proficient degree, the improvements I would get from increasing my keystrokes are marginal at best. The real wins are using tools that reduce the mental overhead of those tasks, e.g. when composing an email having automated spell checks fix my most common typos, when writing markdown having a live side by side preview, and when editing code having tools with semantic knowledge so that I can navigate mt code structurally, not as text. Those things give me orders of magnitudes of productivity increases.
Chording itself is not all that difficult if your keyboard is set up for it. I think you'd be shocked at what opens source firmware like ZMK and QMK can accomplish. It does require you to recalibrate your mind. You use the "shift" key all the time. Using layers is doing the same, except you can make that layer key whatever you want and wherever you want. This is not more error prone than moving your hands from home row to press a function key.
> It also puts unnecessary stress on your wrists, and not moving your hands for long periods of time in the name of efficiency is a sure fire way to end up with carpal tunnel syndrome.
It does not add any additional stress on your wrists beyond what normal typing does. No one is suggesting you keep your hands stationary, they're suggesting you keep your keys close enough to you that you don't naturally end up contorting your wrists like you do on a standard layout keyboard. All staggered, nonstandard or otherwise layouts are not ergonomic. They force your fingers and your wrists to contort heavily with use. Whether or not this ends up affecting you depends largely on genetics. There are people twice my age still typing on full sized keyboards and have been their entire life and their hands are perfectly fine. For me personally, using an alternative layout with yes, chorded keys, has made it possible for me to continue typing at all. Also, you're not giving your wrists a break by moving your hand over to the function keys or to the navigation cluster. You do that with actual breaks and stretching.
> The only computing task where I'm primarily typing is when I'm practicing typing. When I'm actively writing code, I'm primarily thinking, planning, and transcribing. When I'm reading code, I'm semantically navigating. When I'm taking notes, writing documentation or responding to communication, again I'm not primarily typing I'm composing. As someone who can touch type to a proficient degree, the improvements I would get from increasing my keystrokes are marginal at best. The real wins are using tools that reduce the mental overhead of those tasks, e.g. when composing an email having automated spell checks fix my most common typos, when writing markdown having a live side by side preview, and when editing code having tools with semantic knowledge so that I can navigate mt code structurally, not as text. Those things give me orders of magnitudes of productivity increases.
Your argument boils down to you don't think your keyboard matters, in which case you arguing for keeping your full sized standard layout keyboard with a navigation cluster, function row, and number pad is completely moot. This is not the first time I've heard this argument; it's almost always the same one and it's always from obstinate people who've never actually tried anything else, because they're overly confident in their own opinion that their keyboard, the instrument they primarily use to interact with their computer, cannot be improved upon. It's almost zealous.
If you are so certain that your keyboard plays such a minor role in your computing, then use something else. Use an on-screen keyboard that you have to click each key with a mouse, that is available on all major operating systems. It is, after all, such a minor and unimportant part of what you do on the computer, after all!
F5 for refresh. F10/F11 for step debugging. F12 for goto definition.
Similarly I have media keys mapped on the same function layer.
Given that no such keyboards exists, a moveable number pad is the second best option.
https://switchplate.co/collections/southpaw-full-size-group-...
This depends on your platform. On macOS, almost all keyboard shortcuts are centred around the cmd/apple key next to the spacebar (where alt would be on a non-mac keyboard) and an alphanumeric key. F-keys are hardly used and if they do, you know you're likely dealing with a an app ported from Linux or Windows or which is cross-platform.
It's personal preference of course, but I like my shortcuts this way as I just have to thumb the cmd key and press any other key within reach, instead of having to stretch to f-keys (cmd+q vs alt+f4) or use any of the other fingers to use the ctrl key for copy pasting (cmd+c vs ctrl+c).
I use the small Apple keyboard as a daily driver on my desktop instead of the full version because it has the exact same layout as the keyboard on my laptop. Which is great as I don't have to built muscle memory for 2 layouts. Of course you are missing dedicated home/end/page keys. But the fn button along with the arrow keys make up for that (also cmd/opt + arrow keys often works better for navigating anyways as they are aware of paragraphs, line endings etc).
Now 40%, that's too little keys, a number row is important
I got a really nice large wooden desk for cheap from a store in the US when I lived there, it was <50% retail price because of some bad surface scratches. Here in NZ wooden furniture is stupidly expensive. I've just finished, nearly 10 years later, resurfacing it. Plenty of space for crap on top, plus three drawers to hide cables, hankies etc. I've got one of those Aeron chairs. It was my chair at work years ago and then through the company being bought out, remote working and bad record keeping it ended up being mine.
The most important thing for me about a working area is that I can have all my stuff close by. Guitar on one side so I can take a music break from work. I usually have a painting on the go too as another rest from work hobby, so I've got a crappy easel on the other side. It's not the cleanest area, but it's the first time in my adult life that I've had a space just for myself.
For more general desk junk buildup I have to neaten it up every week or two or it too will become a distraction.
I can't just walk off without mentioning the importance of a tactical housecat capable of pre-cleaning the dishes so as to not attract vermin- the plus side being if said housecat is a subpar dishwasher, they're all too willing to take care of any enterprising houseflies bound for a meal.
Both extremes are not very productive. But a person doing actual work might have more than just a completely empty desk. What about a cup of coffee, or a notepad, or a small whiteboard, or a reference manual? Because if everything you might need is on your pc and you don't leverage your immediate three dimensional reality, you're not at peak productivity. A manual on the desk is "better" than a PDF on a second workspace.
Though one things missing from all the fluff about how things look is how things feel. Having a foot rest, or something I can put my feed against is super important to getting things done and not having my body feel like crap at the end of the day.
maintenance > cleanup.
I prefer cleaning things up(both digital and physical) at the end of the day, to relieve my mind that I'm "done" with work and move on to other things. I found it's horrible to wake up, sitting at your desk and the first thing you see is all your piles of crap that your postpone the night before.
Your whole being leads to a design process. Your whole being, the circumstances you grew up in determined what you value. This determines whether you like cozy spaces, or stark sterile spaces, dark or light wood, pops of colours or neutrality. If you grew up with hoarders, perhaps you were always drawn to zen minimalism. And if you nourished that seed, later in life, you wouldn't just be able to leave that need at the door when you started designing something. You'd bring your whole value system to it. You'd look for elimiation. Same with if you like symmetry, or if you like "authenticity" which is maybe just a posh word for transparency of purpose. My favourite example of this is the Windows Phone. They assumed people are digital natives, and don't mind flat rectangles which tell you just the information you need (live tiles) and no more. It started the downfall of skeumorphism and put paid to Apple's old iOS design too, but in effect, it was driven by a value system of an interface being digital-first and not needing to conform to physical reality since people are well-versed with the digital world.
Perhaps designers love to talk too much about this stuff, all of it in hushed worshippy tones which can be off-putting. But there are kernels of truth in it, I think.
It looks impractical, but the pictures, colours and immaculate arrangement of the desks drive us to click the red heart button. OP feels good, the reward system is strengthened.
One thing is certain, none of those setup look used. They don't look like the desk of someone that has just finished designing or creating something very hard for the past few hours.
If you share a photo of your bedroom with someone for whatever reason do you share an unmade bed to show how it looks after you've slept?
Edit: I just googled it, and sure enough, it already exists:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeskPorn/
Rule 34 strikes again!
By that token, mine must be some sort of unspeakablly deviant corner:
There are car buffs, cycling fanatics, outdoorsmen, musicians, woodworkers, and all kinds of other people who put similar amounts of thought into their gear and space.
The phrase “knowledge workers” makes me physically ill.
For white collar, soft skills are more important then domain knowledge for example and for blue collar work you'll need to be able to physically apply the knowledge.
That would leave the term to mean "your soft skills and handiness are secondary to your domain knowledge"
Whereas people actually call themselves "rockstar developers" "language ninjas" or "data scientists".
Right now, my setup is a macbook in a roost stand, with an ipad propped up side-caring. Decent mechanical keyboard + mouse and a best effort at hiding wires. Would love to hear about other options.
Trackballs are nice to have in addition to mice.
I used a 17" DIY portable monitor for about two years when I didn't have a permanent workspace and the only complaints I have about using it are solved in most commercial models, I just stubbornly wanted to use my own. Just be careful with the cheap ones as they often have the same problems: poor viewing angles, no backlight adjustment, wobbly kickstand, multiple cables required....
https://www.pulse-audio.co.uk/product/pls00453/
The lip around the platform (to prevent a projector from falling over the edge) may interfere with your ty[ing if you have a very thing laptop, however.
Well, I started with an air of Zen[1] when the Pandemic started and now I'm in my natural habitat[2]. But one day, one day, I will have a desk setup worthy of an essay. Btw, love Arun's setup and will refer to his articles for inspiration.
Also, "The choice of computer, in this case, isn’t that important."
Definitely has different priorities than I do.
My setup is my laptop on an Ikea Björkåsen (featuring cupholder with nifty notch for the mug handle) and my arse on a Poäng. If that’s not minimal I don’t know what is.
My setup has monitors on arms at a similar height, lining up their horizontal centers with my eyeline so my head position and back are neutral.
But I did start in the time when we had dedicated holes for CRT monitors in desks so you could put them low enough.
For me it's almost always part of the consideration, though I'll concede that for items that are required for work, it needs to be able to do that well first.
"You're doing it for them"
Nothing to do with aesthetics, although they are lovely.
my desk is horrible to look at but i can fix my girl scooter with 2ns latency or epxoy glue something. my desk is multitasking ready.