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Comment by lburton | Hacker News Reader

This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmware keyboard (I was also already typing on a split keyboard so that might be part of the reason it was fairly easy to adjust). See https://docs.qmk.fm/features/swap_hands#swap-hands-action

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I have this set up using kmonad[1], and the following config. Many punctation marks are obviously missing, but I'm sure they could be added with a little thought. The mirrored layout is toggled by holding the space key.

    (defalias
      lhs (tap-next-release spc (layer-toggle ytrewq)))
    
    (deflayer ytrewq
      _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           bspc 0    9    8    7    6    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           _    p    o    i    u    y    _    _    _    _    _    _    _         _
           ret  ;    l    k    j    h    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           lsft /    .    ,    m    n    _    _    _    _    _    _         _    _
      _    _    _    _              _              _    _              _    _    _)

1. https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

kmonad:

    written in Haskell
    config in Lisp

Best of both worlds!

It's also apparently cross-platform. Great project!

I am low key thinking about trying this without any disability, as a way of always keeping the right hand on the mouse.

Foot pedal maybe? Or maybe a dedicated mouse button.

I like the idea. Don't you love those words like "creed" or "scare" that can be typed with one hand!

Stewardess ;)

Does your usual computer activity require a lot of mouse work? Ten years ago I went down this path when my coworker caught me adding bindings to my mouse buttons. He sat me down at his machine and showed me vim wasn't just an old fart text editor and that the bindings can be used in other editors.

Ofc if you're not doing text based work this wouldn't apply.

I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(

Doesn't a touch-screen make it easy? When I use my laptop I seldomly use the mouse nowadays. I scroll or tap/move the cursor with my finder on the screen, and I 'fine tune' the location with the arrows.

I had the same experience, my typing speed with two hands is 90-120 but with one hand i can still get 50-70. The hard part is punctuation but with AI these days you could try just prompting and let the AI deal with syntax for you.

That's a fast speed. I practice to get to 60 then said well, that's good enough!

Right, you could run your text through an LLM that adds punctuation and then fix up the result manually. Would probably save time + fatigue

Yes, I was just going to make this suggestion. If it's a temporary problem, you probably don't want a solution that requires extensive retraining to use. A mirrored keyboard takes advantage of existing brain wiring.

autohotkey layout: https://github.com/hanmindev/mirrorboard

xkb layout: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

In a quick experiment, I found that utterly baffling. On zero practice, it was much faster for me to type with just my left hand. (Though it requires me to keep looking at the keyboard, because I'm leaving the home position.)

Randall Munroe talks about exactly this:

https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

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