Gabriel Gunderson wrote:
This is less dramatic, but when I use a "standard" keyboard my typing
slows to a crawl. I'm so accustomed to the "natural" keyboards that I
have a hard time knowing where my fingers are on a standard. I think
it has to do with not using the little warts on the "f" and "j" keys
for finger placement. With the natural my fingers just kinda know
where to go.
I get an "off by one" key on my right hand under my ring and pinkie
fingers. So when wanting to type "ll" do show a long listing of the
directory, I will hit a ";;". It's kinda embarrassing when you're
working at someone's keyboard. Then what will happen is I'll end up
lifting my right hand to be sure of finger placement (thus the slow to
a crawl).
Anyway, my old keyboard is getting ready to be replaced and I'm
thinking about getting rid of "natural" keyboards all together. Is it
just me or are they selling less of them anyway? And does anyone else
suffer from FKBS (Foreign Keyboard Syndrome)?
;ater,
Gabe
I tried the ``natural'' keyboards a few years ago when one showed up
with a new PC-- but eventually went back to the $15-20 basic keyboard.
A few things drove me completely nuts w/ the natural keyboard. 1st was
the placement of all the [insert][home][pageup][delete][end][pagedown]
keys that are right above the arrow keys. The natural keyboard had all
these keys flipped arrount 2x3 col/row instead of 3x2 col/row. Come to
think about it-- the arrow keys were small and screwed up too. just
drove me crazy-- but the final factor was my use of drawing programs. I
was using enough CAD software that it became very un-natural to navigate
my left hand across the huge gap in the middle of the keyboard. I
eventually had a senior layout designer show me a few productivity
tricks for CAD-- where you map your most common functions to bindkeys on
the left half of the keyboard-- this way you can keep you right hand on
the mouse and your left hand in the same place-- natural keyboards may
not be as bad once you get all the bind keys setup/customized-- but when
the brain is in ``drawing'' mode-- it likes to view the whole keyboard
together....
Now-- years later-- I've got 5+ years on a Sun Keyboard-- that combined
w/ learning emacs on the sun-- I find the 1st thing I customize in linux
now is the swapping of the caps-lock and ctrl keys so it's like the sun
keyboard. It just feels more natural to me this way [even though i'll
probably have to change this on every keyboard i use for the rest of my
life].
Also-- if you find yourself continuing to hit the [;] instead of the [l]
key a year after your transition back to standard kayboards-- you could
just map your keys over-- kind of like when I have aliases set in the
shell for the commands I commonly mistype.
Justin Gedge
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