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Comment by iagooar | Hacker News Reader

I saw the keyboard to be operated by the left hand only and here is my (totally personal and somewhoat adjacent) problem with it.

My left hand is the one which has suffered the most the many hours of using a keyboard over the last +-25 years. While the right hand has the occasional break from the keyboard when using the mouse, the left hand is constantly glued to the keyboard.

It also has a much tougher job - all the cmd, ctrl, alt and shift + combinations are mostly done using the left hand - e.g. on Mac you cannot cmd+shift+ select text with the arrows - you must use the left hand - so it ends up doing so much more work.

I wonder if there are other people with the same problem. My right hand never hurts after many hours of computer work - but the left hand does. It hurts even now that I am typing and I haven't even spent more than an hour doing it.

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  >It also has a much tougher job - all the cmd, ctrl, alt and shift + combinations are mostly done using the left hand

Look into homerow mods if you are prepared to do some (invasive) key remaps in software: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods

This has changed my life so much for the better. Once I knew about this, I needed look no further.

And if you like it, picking up any QMK or ZMK compatible keyboard would let you do it in firmware too!

Please do your hands a favor and get yourself an ergonomic keyboard! Thumb keys especially alleviate the issues with modifiers that you're describing.

I use a Glove80 as my daily driver right now, although the price tag to build quality ratio is not amazing, so idk if I would recommend it particularly. But there's a massive world of ergo keyboards out there--surely the right one for you exists somewhere!

I'm at the point where I need to redefine cmd-z, x, c, v because my left thumb doesn't want to do that dance anymore. It's been painful for a year, and I finally got to the point of redefining it a couple weeks ago. And the muscle memory is so ingrained that I changed it to option ', 1, 2, 3 and never thought about the idea that my right hand could do it.

They started with the left hand as requested, but made right hand version as well.

I wish these were also commercially available... I'd love to pay for one of these... I know it's open sources, but I don't know the language nor do I have the skills to construct one myself.

You should remap ctrl/cmd (whatever feels better) to caps lock. It'll be much more convenient.

Check out make caps lock great again.

https://github.com/Vonng/Capslock

I was getting hand pain, switched to a Totem keyboard. 38 keys, 6 thumb keys. Column splay & never reaching for number row has greatly helped. 20g actuation means little force needed

there's a right-hand version too :)

Use your right hand for meta keys?

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