A guide to home row mods | Hacker News Reader

A guide to home row mods

precondition.github.io

73 pointswtrm35 comments

Sun keyboards had Ctrl where Caps typically lies, and it was so convenient that I have remapped this in every environment I use for decades now.

This presents a small annoyance when I need to use another computer and start TYPING IN CAPS when I don’t intend to

This home row mod idea makes a lot of sense to me but I don’t think I would want to train my muscle memory to use such a drastic difference in behavior lest I find myself embarrassingly useless when presenting on a random work computer that doesn’t support this

The kbd community has all kinds of small form factor / isometric layouts like this that are totally custom and efficient but just make me think how you just train your hands to be shockingly unproductive on 99.99% of other systems

> The kbd community has all kinds of small form factor / isometric layouts like this that are totally custom and efficient but just make me think how you just train your hands to be shockingly unproductive on 99.99% of other systems

I am curious, what kind of conditions require you to be productive on "other systems"? As a programmer these days, I pretty much am never told to sit in front of a random keyboard and expected to be productive there. I have the Ctrl/Caps mod you mentioned, and it bites me on other computers — but these typically tend to be instances of me helping some friend out with a computer problem. Any time that I am going to working for an entire day or more on a computer, I tend to figure out a way to swap Caps with Ctrl on it.

I can imagine the "should be able to be productive on any system" being a problem in the days when computers were scarce, and for instance, one had to use the computers in a university lab or similar. I can even imagine it today when you're talking about servers (e.g. I need to be able to use emacs, vi, and nano on any server that I'm logged into). But for keyboard input these days, it seems like we have the luxury to use our own highly customized input devices for 99.99% of the time.

I probably regularly use 4-5 different machines regularly (2 at home, my work laptop, work laptop plugged into it's dock at work, embedded system flashing machine).

I also help coworkers when handing off a assembled embedded machine, which regularly involves temporarily helping out on their computer for a few minutes now and then.

I can't exactly see swapping coworkers keyboards out just to help debug something.

Exactly. My main work computer is a laptop on a dock, but I'm not always at my desk. I'm not going to carry the external keyboard around.

The pros never seemed like they'd outweigh the cons. I love smaller mechanical keyboards, but I'm not going to venture off of QWERTY.

I think a more common situation for many people is having to use the laptop keyboard instead of an external keyboard, for example because you are traveling.

i ended up customizing an ortholinear keyboard, took a little while to learn, but seems like my brain keeps a separate "mental map" of it, and it doesn't interfere with my typing on a standard laptop.

Same, I regularly switch from ortho colemak (with home row mods, key expansions, symbol layers, etc) to qwerty on my laptop with no issues.

The only thing that messes me up is if I start looking at the keyboard or trying to bypass my muscle memory to type. E.g. to input a complex password with uncommon symbols.

> I am curious, what kind of conditions require you to be productive on "other systems"?

For me, vnc and qemu: I haven't found an easy way to have gvncviewer use my caps-to-control-or-esc

Even just caps-to-control would make happy!

With QMK you don't have this issue since it runs on your keyboard

On other systems, I may run scripts but I can't carry my keyboard.

Maybe we understand other systems differently.

I see. From your comment it seemed to me like the other systems were remote systems from your machine.

On-site (eg in a dc), pairing, some kinds of hot desking, user support.

I've mostly given up on customising and try to find efficient ways to work within each OS's defaults.

The wildcard is when you're hands-on keyboard with a heavy customiser who has wildly different preferences than you :)

In my experience, the stranger your weird keyboard, the less it impacts your ability to use a normal keyboard. Learning the guitar doesn't make you worse at piano-- your brain is capable of understanding how to use multiple tools, and the lack of physical similarity seems to help it disambiguate.

> lest I find myself embarrassingly useless when presenting on a random work computer that doesn’t support this

I use a completely custom layout one a small keyboard you're describing, but I can still type just as well (in fact even faster) on a regular keyboard with a regular keymap.

This fear is completely overblown. As long as you sometimes use a regular keyboard, you will retain your muscle memory.

I cannot do this.

Just because you can do so easily does not mean everyone can. I am apparently unable to segment my muscle memory like you seem to be able to (I'm actually jealous you can do that!).

I don't think it's any different from, say, speaking other languages or switching back and forth from countries that drive on different sides. These things just become automatic.

But that's not universal either; I have a friend who started losing english vocabulary when they first learned french. (The collected-anecdote metaphor (not, afaik backed up by any particular cognitive science) seems to be having "slots" for language, one-vs-two-vs-many...)

I just think it comes down to practice, like being able to speak multiple languages or program in different programming languages.

And something that can help is to differentiate your layout physically. In my case an entirely different keyboard, but even something like pressing space with the other hand can help keep them separate.

Completely agree, however when I customized a standard keyboard, I DID have issues switching back. Now I've customized an ortholinear split hand keyboard, and my brain seems to keep this as a completely separate mental map and I have no issues switching to my laptop keyboard anymore.

Welcome to the world of being someone who uses the Dvorak Layout. I quickly learned that my brain can't hold "two layouts" and my qwerty-layout touch typing pretty much evaporated after focusing on typing exclusively Dvorak. I can touch type Dvorak at over 90wpm, and Qwerty at maybe half that at best.

The thing that you somewhat over-exaggerate is the frequency at which I'm not using "my own computer" that has been already setup with Dvorak. Its exceedingly rare that I ever type anything on someone else's machine.

I’ve solved this by keeping my laptop keyboard uncustomized, while using Colemak-dh and home row mods on my desktop split keyboard.

I’m proficient enough that I can work on anyone else’s machine well, and I have the comfort and speed benefits on my main workstation.

> Sun keyboards had Ctrl where Caps typically lies

The Lord intended it to be this way. No arguing with this, heathens.

One thing that I've found in addressing the worry about training muscle memory on 99% of "standard" keyboards: use a keyboard that is sufficiently different from standard that you brain inherently recognizes the difference.

I use a dygma defy ortholinear keyboard and haven't seen any reduction in accuracy when using my normal mac keyboard. however when I customized a standard keyboard layout I DID find myself making mistakes. I put this up to my brain having a different mental map of the ortholinear keyboard, in the same way that typing with our thumbs on our phones doesn't impede our typing ability on a laptop.

I've been using home-row mods on my moonlander layout (a modified miryoku layout[0]). The big problem has been the timings. Sometimes I get two letters, instead of a shifted key, and sometimes I get my GUI key pressed instead of the letter 'a'.

I've recently fine-tuned my timings so that shift/f/j keys have a shorter time to invoke shift, and the GUI/a/; key requires a longer time to invoke the GUI modifier.

It does seem to have improved things.

[0]https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/b7yOD/latest/0

Haven't been able to make them consistently work on my moonlander. Too many mistypes when quickly writing code. Ultimately removed everything time-related and stateful and only kept simple layers - worked great for the last ~2 years.

My only problem with this is I don't normally hold the buckey key particularly long -- I strike the buckey key and selector key (i.e. an alphabetic) simultaneously and release. Holding it down would break decades of muscle / rhythm memory. This is the same reason I don't use key repeat.

Hmm, I don't disable key repeat but never invoke it which confirms/reinforces my belief that I do a simultaneous strike.

Perhaps others use their keyboards differently.

Using the "sticky keys" accessibility feature eliminates all my needs for anything like this, or for ctrl/shift swapping.

One of the motivations given in TFA is four-modifier keystrokes, which a) are a great motivator for modal editing (IMO) over traditional editors that are heavily dependent on modifiers for keyboard accelerators (e.g., (neo)vi(m) vs. emacs), b) sticky keys. Sure, 4-modifier combos with sticky keys still requires 5 keystrokes altogether, but not all at once, so it's at least manageable.

Most importantly sticky keys is a great way to avoid RSI! That's because with sticky keys you don't need to do all these deviations to hit multiple keys at once. Before I discovered sticky keys I thought I'd have to give up tech because typing was becoming painful. Sticky keys saved my career because as long as I'm disciplined about sticky keys usage I don't get hurt by everyday typing. Obviously YMMV, but I strongly suspect that many people type incorrectly by trying to hit modifiers and modified keys with the same hand, and also any apps that require more than one modifier will necessarily require at least two keys to be pressed with one hand, and that seems like a recipe for pain-causing deviations. E.g., ulnar deviation, which is when you turn your hand outward to hit a key with a pinky (typically) instead of moving your hand so the relevant finger is closer to the key it's meant to press. All these deviations stress the associated nerve, which then causes pain.

Sticky keys is also available on every OS. Not so sure about home row mods.

TFA should list sticky keys as an alternative of sorts.

I've been using a low profile aurora sweep (34 keys) keyboard + miryoku for the last year and honestly best thing I did.

It has a mouse layer that made use the mouse way less, I've even spent a month without a mouse when its battery died about and I set it aside to charge and forgot about it. yes I'm aware about enabling the numeric keypad as a mouse, but this is much better. the switch is much more effortless, you just need to put your left thumb down.

the most important part of this shift is that it made typing so comfortable for my hands that I forget about the whole process. A thing that never happened to me with a standard keyboard even though I've been trying for many years.

when I have to go back to using a normal keyboard every now and then, these home row mods, the row staggering, and the huge distance my finger have to travel are things I'm now awfully aware of and make me want to go back as soon as possible.

I tried them for awhile, but there was always just enough false positives to make it too intrusive for normal work flow, especially if you're normally a fast typer. In the end, it was better to either just add more thumb keys in a custom layout, or eschew such clever shortcuts altogether when using a normal keyboard.

Agreed. On a vial qmk build it was impossible. When remoting into work for citrix it also seemed to be considerably worse.

I've tried this, but I just can't get it to work nicely. I type rather quickly and often overlap my key presses, so if the first key is on the home row then it gets ignored and the second becomes modified instead. I really don't have any trouble reaching just outside the rows to hit the mods, either.

The laptop my job provided me to write programs on has no home, end, pgup or pgdn keys. Which I find to be insane. I learned quickly that I just can't function without an end key.

So I remapped capslock to end and honestly it's been life changing.

I just wish I could replicate this on my Linux machines now. I've built the muscle memory for it, but I have to hesitate every time to make sure I'm in windows where the key works.

I'm sure it's possible, but none of the easy solutions I've tried so far have worked, and I'm not really willing to go tinkering in multiple config files hidden deep in the system. I need something more portable than that.

Oh so happy to see this on hacker news!

I used this guide (in combination of a few other resources) to add Home Row mods to my QMK modded Kinesis Advantage 2 and my Corne.

After 6 month of use, one change I made though is instead putting the mod keys on the home row, I put them on the row below. It turned out to be more suitable for me

I remapped the numeric pad that I never use. I used AutoHotKey and mapped keys to bitwarden auto fill-in, a shortcut to Obsidian, to a launcher, etc.

This is really useful and it shows when I am not at my large keyboard but only on the laptop one

Anyone know if there's a good way to allow vial / qmk like customizations with a mac keyboard? I use things like auto shift on my custom splits, but would like to have some similar features on my mac keyboard.

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