Typing stealth: a review of the CODE Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

Typing stealth: a review of the CODE Keyboard

arstechnica.com

39 pointsjseliger61 comments

I've read a lot of posts on programming-related blogs about the importance of typing skill and keyboards. Maybe it's just me, but at least as far as typing skill/speed goes, I'm not really seeing it. Sure, a lot of our job is typing, and you need some baseline level of skill at it, but I don't think I've ever been hindered in my ability to produce code and features faster by my not-particularly-great typing abilities. If I could wave a magic wand and make myself type twice as fast as I currently do, I don't think my overall productivity would change much at all. The majority of my time is spent thinking about the best way to create or fix something, researching options, etc. The actual process of getting the result of that onto the screen seems relatively quick by comparison.

I might even go so far as to say that, if your typing speed is seriously hindering your productivity, then your language may have too much boilerplate to it, and you might want to put together some code-generation tools for yourself.

On the other hand, I will say that I now prefer those ergonomic keyboards with the split, down-sloping keys. After extended fast typing on a normal keyboard (writing documentation), I sometimes get a mild wrist pain, and using this type of keyboard seems to prevent this without interfering with my overall typing. They seem to be surprisingly hard to find though, with like 5-10 of them on Amazon versus hundreds of conventional keyboards.

I have thought about this as well, and with that in mind, I've tried to take notice of how typing affects me (I'm a pretty fast typist, but I think this experience is not dependent on any particular typing speed).

What seems to be the main problem is that typing dominates my internal monologue. I can't continue to keep my ideas fresh in my mental "cache" while I'm typing, because the part of my mind that would be used for that is busy uselessly sounding out the text that I'm typing. So every second I spend typing is a second that I'm not actively maintaining and refreshing my conception of the big picture. The more code I have to type in between thinking about a problem and finishing the solution, the more likely I am to have to stop, rethink the problem, and rework a piece of code I'm writing to fit some constraint I lost track of.

Put another way, typing is a process that forces me to think through the exact implementation of a problem at a snail's pace (compared to normal mental operation). Not more carefully, mind you, but more slowly.

That might be part of the issue. My typing isn't particularly fast, but it is mindless. I spend virtually no mental effort on typing while I'm actually doing it, so I'm free to think about exactly what I'm trying to do and what the best way to do it is.

Hypothesis test (I'll tell you the hypothesis after you answer): What is the experience of thinking like for you?

1,500 chars to explain how typing is unnecessary. I hope you see the irony.

Perhaps you're one of those people who declares: "I'm not rate-limited! I spend all my time in design and almost none of it entering code!" I hear that all the time.

You're wrong, though. Programmers type all day long, even when they're designing. Especially when they're designing, in fact, because they need to have conversations with remote participants.

Here's the industry's dirty secret:

Programmers who don't touch-type fit a profile.

-- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ro/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest...

This layout still feels inferior next to my http://trulyergonomic.com/ keyboard. I was really skeptical at first, especially with the price tag - but I'd never go back now.

The layout looks great, with an easier layout to learn than my DataHand--but do you ever miss the option/Windows key being in a convenient location? Or is the diamond convenient enough? My Topres require as little as 35g of pressure--what is the activation force required here? And do you miss being able to type "cd" quickly with a two finger combo due to the straight columns?

I don't miss where the windows key is because I rarely have a need to press it. Linux is my primary OS. I also have the extended Truly Ergonomic, and I think I could remap the extra key to windows if I so desired.

I'm not sure exactly what the activation pressure is, but I don't think it's much off 35g. I think the exact number is in the specs on the website.

The 'cd' thing I can type with one hand, but that's because I type using dvorak.

I'd consider it if the arrow key / edit block hadn't been destroyed.

I do a lot of editing with the arrow keys + insert / delete / home / end / page up / page down block. Generally, all cuts, pastes, block moves etc. are done with those, especially since Ctrl-{C,X,V} are not convenient with a Dvorak layout.

For similar reasons I've never gotten a keyboard that mucked around with the 6 keys above the arrow keys.

I've been considering some of the alternative ergonomic keyboards, and found an external numpad with arrows and editing keys [0]. I've been using an Apple Adjustable Keyboard [1], which has a separate numpad which can be used separately from the rest of the keyboard (though requires an ADB port). Unfortunately, the 6-key cluster on the AAK is awful, and painful to use regularly (tiny dome keys which require too much pressure for their tiny size).

[0] http://www.ergogeek.com/ione-scorpius-32-mechanical-numeric-...

[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Adjustable_Keyb...

I'd be all over that if it had some kind of integrated mouse pointer. I loathe moving my entire hand around to mouse. So I stay with the Lenovo Travel Ultranav.

Isn't that keyboard no longer in production?

Have you tried using their latest keyboards which drop the touchpad and come with the new style keys?

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...

I'm not sure about their production status. A quick search does seem to indicate that you are correct.

I have a 2013 Thinkpad so I know about the new keys and I don't mind them at all. And I really like that they've gotten rid of the trackpad completely on the new models since I hate trackpads even more than a separate mouse.

But I do rest my palms on the area beside the trackpad. Looking at the new models that area seems like it might be a bit short. I'm not sure where my wrists would rest there and I fear they may be in some in between zone not completely on the keyboard and not completely off of it. That would probably be annoying. Hopefully that's not the case. I'm tempted to order one of these just to find out whether I find them okay or not. If I don't, I'll have to scour the internet for older models and buy a few. Thanks for the heads-up :)

Don't you miss the convenience of multi finger gestures on the touchpad?

I haven't got used to the trackpoint but that's because I tend to use the touchpad more. I guess I should disable the touchpad completely and force myself to learn/adapt to the trackpoint.

I think a split keyboard with mechanical keys, without a number pad, and with a trackpoint (on both sides so lefties are happy) would make for a great keyboard.

Miss? I've never used multi-finger gestures on a touchpad. Mostly because I don't use touchpads. I think that kind of interaction feature came about after I had already written them off as annoying. But it seems like I'd have to significantly remove my focus from the home row to do that - instant disdain.

I just looked it up and it appears as though these gestures you speak of are used for scrolling, swiping, zooming, and alternate clicking just like on a tablet.

I use the alternate button (left mouse button for me) for alternate clicking.

I use the middle button for scrolling.

Swiping, I think is to switch apps? That would be alt-tab.

Zooming is usually some key combination or key in combination with a left or right mouse button drag.

If you don't use the pointer it's probably just a matter of getting used to and tweaking the settings. Make sure to go into the mouse settings and play with both the trackpoint firm-touch, light-touch sensitivity as well as the operating system's pointer speed. Then just practice. I've even gotten to the point where I can do a half decent job playing a FPS with the trackpoint. I wouldn't try to compete in Quake Arena with it, but for casual single player use it's quite alright.

> I use the middle button for scrolling.

Great tip, didn't know about this. It works for both vertical and horizontal scrolling.

With a layout like that, I bet you can't go back. The shift keys are in such a very odd position, with Alt, a rarely used key, sitting in the prime spot.

"Ergonomic" keyboards tend to be trouble for anyone who's not a strict home-row typer. I cross over the middle a lot, like for "keyboard" the Y is for left hand. Maybe it's more like a piano thing, where you're sort of hitting chords, pairs of letters in sequence ("e", "y"), hands moving into position to prepare, versus regimented typing. That giant gulf in the middle prevents all that.

Have you tried an ergonomic keyboard? I tend to be a bit of a floaty typist as well, but a couple years ago I used a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard for a year. To my surprise, I found that I got used to it pretty quickly.

I have. My highly subjective opinion is that they're all wrong.

I've been typing on regular keyboards for long enough they don't bother me.

Actually, I find the shift keys are in a superb place. While I was used to having control there, now that I work primarily in Vim, I have more of a need to modify with shift rather than control. The new location of shift is actually one of my favourite changes!

I agree that good typing discipline is important. Luckily, I am very home row focused, as I made a lot of effort to type like that when I made the switch from qwerty to dvorak.

I'm going to second this. It definitely took a while to get used to, but once you do...

That said, a big downside of using a non-standard keyboard layout is the number of mistakes you make when you switch back to a normal keyboard (laptops, colleagues' computers, etc.)

I found this true for a while, but I tend to alternate quite a lot. I work directly on my laptop from home, with a normal layout - I occasionally shift in the wrong place, but that's about it. I have bigger problems sharing keyboards as I don't type qwerty, but I type dvorak. That switch takes a lot more mental processing.

My daily driver is the kinesis advantage.

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

Me too, could never go back.

Same here. I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/ .

Why nowadays keyboards usually don't have L-shaped Enters? I can't imagine productively working without it...

Steelseries mechanical keyboards generally have L shaped enter keys. It's part of the reason why I never bought one.

I understand your opinion as a matter of preference, but why does your productivity require it?

I'm a programmer, so as opposed to prose-like text typers, I heavily use Enter for newlines. And I exclusively use my right hand's pinky finger to press it without precise aiming/thinking/looking.

It is really hard for me to do this for non-L Enters.

Funny. I'm also a programmer and I hate L-Enters because the backslash and vertical bar is in the wrong place.

It also means that either the backspace or the left shift is smaller, and I hate that too.

The only "sacrifice" for me is the small Backspace, and the backslash/vertical is just left to it. Both Shifts are big.

I have yet to find a mechanical keyboard with such a layout. And I think I can deal with smaller Right Shift.

While the L-shaped Enter key isn't standard on most stock keyboards sold in the U.S., you can still find large amounts of new ones online. You can normally find them under the ISO or U.K. style descriptors.

I'm partial to my ergodox[1]. It does have blue switches, but if I decide I want to switch to clear I can do the swap myself.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7245/ergodox-review-an-ergonom...

I just don't see why there's all the hype over this keyboard versus any other mechanical board (Filco, Leopold, Ducky, etc) other than PR.

For me personally, nothing beats an 87-key (standard 101-key minus the number pad, but with arrow keys and stuff above them) with Cherry MX Brown switches. Blues are also acceptable in a pinch (reminiscent of the old Northgate Omnikey boards). The only superior board is of course the IBM/Unicomp models with buckling springs.

All this is my opinion and preference; I have coworkers who love the "flat" chiclet-style keyboards like the Apple models; I can't stand them and they make my fingers hurt due to lack of travel. Bad habit from learning to type on a Selectric II in the late 80s.

> Atwood designed the CODE keyboard as the answer to all of the touch-screen typing we now do.

He designed a physical keyboard to replace a touch screen keyboard (which arguably no hacker would use for coding) that mimics a... physical keyboard?

I've been told by several people I''m a "heavy" typer. The old Dell keyboards I got from companies made my typing loud enough to hear like the author noted. The only way to suppress the clacking was to type slower and softer.

This keyboard looks like a good fit for someone with my typing style.

Edit: Thanks to everybody for posting links to their favorite keyboards, hopefully I can find a good one if this one doesn't work out.

For those of us who work on a laptop all day, who don't want a separate keyboard for it, but could buy a new laptop based on it having a great keyboard:

Any suggestions for a laptop with a great keyboard?

Specifically any non-Apple laptop?

The Thinkpad keyboards are so great that I bought an external one for work computer. The mouse nub (or whatever it's called) is great, too, although I have a nice Logitech mouse for things like photoshop.

ThinkPad T430s user here, with the new keyboard. Contrary to popular online opinion, the keyboard is pretty good.

I'll 2nd that. I've only ever had one Thinkpad (X100e, no longer in production) but the keyboard is amazing. I don't know if other Thinkpads have the same "chiclet" style keys but it's made me way of future laptop purchases.. other keyboards just don't compare. The nub is interesting but I don't use the mouse a whole lot in general. When the need arises I don't mind reaching for the trackpad.

I really like the way my Thinkpad feels. Give it a try somewhere; Lenovo is known for having great keyboards on laptops.

This sounds pretty neat; a handful of modest little adjustments that could prevent a lot of headaches. Being able to instantly take Colemak with me to any computer would be amazing (although carrying a keyboard around everywhere I use a computer sounds iffy).

Now I've said some positive things, so I'm going to nitpick. This is HN, after all.

The first thing that stands out to me is that it doesn't seem like a lot of attention has been paid to ergonomic details. The lowest hanging fruit here, which I've never seen in any keyboard, is to put feet on the side toward the user. In almost all cases, the way I've seen people's desks set up is such that there is no way for them to have a neutral wrist position (wrists not bending up). Worse yet, keyboards invariably have those little feet on the back, and people assume they should use them, which causes them to bend their wrists up even more. Ideally, a keyboard would let you fine tune its slope so that you can set it up exactly to your needs, although I have no idea how you would build that conveniently.

The second nitpick is with something Atwood says on the linked page:

> Nothing lets you get your thoughts out of your brain and into words faster and more efficiently than a well made keyboard.

Technically that is true, in the sense that a stenotype is technically a keyboard. But the reason I'm picking this nit is that as someone who has made it a side quest to find something better than a standard computer keyboard, this is a bit of a sore spot for me. The minimum you have to be able manage on a stenotype to be a court reporter is 225 wpm for live testimony. That's a $50k/year job where a requirement is typing faster than the all time world record for a typewriter-style keyboard.

That's a phonetic system, and it's not immediately obvious how to untangle all of the issues with making it work with programming. On the other hand, there's Veyboard, which is non-phonetic and more flexible, and seems like it could be used for programming in its current state. It's slower than stenotype, but far faster than a traditional keyboard.

My point is that it irks me that we have so many people typing so much and getting injured, and not much focus seems to be going into adopting a better, radically different approach. We have a handful of very expensive hardware options intended for specialized markets, and we have Plover[1] (nothing similar exists that I know of for emulating a Veyboard), and that's about it. And on the mass market side, we have less expensive, specially designed ergonomic traditional keyboards based mostly on shakily researched principles.

Would it necessarily help with RSI just to increase typing speed? That needs to be tested. But it seems likely that if you reduce the amount of time spent typing, you'll reduce the amount of damage.

[1]http://plover.stenoknight.com/

Regarding ergonomics, I've been using a Kinesis Advantage for the last couple years (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/), and I would find it hard to return to a standard keyboard all the time.

The Advantage is absurdly expensive relative to other keyboards but for someone who spends a lot of time—too much, probably—typing, it's worth it.

I might have asked you this before (in a prior thread), but do you have the pedals that go with the Kinesis and, if so, how (useful) are they?

Nope. My guess is "reasonably," but I don't see a use case where I'd use them often enough to bother.

Foot pedals can eliminate the need for full sized function keys. You can also use foot pedal wiring to add new physical buttons onto the keyboard.

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=26579.0

You mentioned the difficulty of typing {}[] using the Kinesis Advantage. Perhaps Ctrl, Alt, Shift could be moved to the foot pedals, and then the keys for Ctrl, Alt, Shift could be remapped to {}[].

If you're going to use an unusual keyboard remap it's easier just to adopt a completely different layout, e.g. Programmer Dvorak or something like that. You can use software to remap the symbol keys to be unshifted and on the number row. My remap puts the parentheses keys on the number row in the columns above my left and right index fingers.

The number row can be rearranged so that the odd numbers are under one hand, and the even numbers are under the other (which makes it much easier to learn to touch type numbers because the layout can be "derived" if you forget it.)

You can even set up a dead key to act like Alt-Gr so that you can use both Alts as "Meta" keys in Emacs.

A unique remapping might sound like overkill, but if you learn the new layout while adjusting to a Kinesis it doesn't seem strange at all. It also does not really require any technical knowledge.

That's a great point—I hadn't thought about it, though in retrospect it's obvious.

I've been considering building an Ergodox[0], which has a Kinesis inspired key layout, but does not have the concave key well. In your experience with the Kinesis, would having a flat layout be a significant impediment to the comfort of another matrix key layout?

[0] http://ergodox.org

In your experience with the Kinesis, would having a flat layout be a significant impediment to the comfort of another matrix key layout?

It's probably not optimal but probably is an improvement. Having the space and backspace keys (which are probably the two I use most) under my thumbs is a HUGE advantage.

That being said, if you can get the cash together the Kinesis is worth it. I didn't think so at first, but, as I say in the post, I went back to a regular keyboard after sending the review unit back. Then I found the money.

I'm also a kinesis fan having used one nearly exclusively for the last 4-5 years. For me the concave layout is nice, it makes it easier to reach the keys, but it is not the key ingredient. The thing about the kinesis which would make it very hard to change back to a standard layout keyboard is the thumb based meta keys.

I've looked a the Ergodox myself as well as this one [1] which I'm not sure has a name yet. I read about it originally here on HN [2].

[1] http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=44940.810 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6297356

Have you used the Kinesis Freestyle 2 or the just released Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard? If so, what are your thoughts?

No. They both look like net improvements, however. The Sculpt also uses scissor keys like the ones on MacBooks or, at least at one point, Thinkpads, which is an interesting choice. I prefer keys with more travel, but that's pure preference.

Pretty much no one likes the standard rubber-dome keys.

Regarding stenotype hardware options and Plover, check out the Stenosaurus (http://www.stenosaurus.com). It's not out yet, but it looks promising.

That looks pretty neat. Do they have a page with any more information on it?

There's some information on the Plover blog:

http://plover.stenoknight.com/2013/08/introducing-stenosauru...

http://plover.stenoknight.com/2013/08/hands-on-with-stenosau...

Would be really neat if it incorporated Topre switches instead, but I imagine that would make the price shoot through the roof.

Has anyone noticed they increased background noise when demonstrating the volume of the keyboard?

Yeah, probably to more accurately capture the noise of the keyboard. That's why the laptop is so freaking loud.

How quiet is it actually?

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