Kinesis Contour
So Tom Jones (not THAT Tom Jones— I mean the one that hacks Linux, not lungs) asked me:
What are the things you really like about the Kinesis? For example, do you use the macro functions?
And I went off on a ramble that might be of some slight interest to other typists.
As a little bit of background, I was first introduced to these by some awesome folk at Mpath/Mplayer.com when I worked there. I had used a MS “natural” split keyboard when my wrists first started hurting, but in retrospect its design actually made things worse for me due to the placement of the backspace key and my bad typing habits. So seeing the Contour on Jessica and Brian’s desks was like a revelation. I took the recommended week or so to get used to it and found my speed and accuracy were up and pain was way, way down.
I don’t use the macros at all. I think one of the five or so I’ve owned over the last twelve years I’ve been using them (!!) had a programmable upgrade on it that I messed around with for a little bit then gave up on. It just doesn’t fit my use case.
I use a mac keyboard about half the time and the kinesis the rest — I like the compact macbook pro kb with the touchpad in the middle because there’s minimal hand movement to get mousing around — in fact there is a touchpad made to go between the two halves of the contour for exactly this reason. I use a magic mouse with my kinesis at work just ‘cause.
The keystrokes that i think are the real win on the kinesis are backspace/delete and enter. these are normally pinky reaches that were what originally gave me RSI (outward flexion at the wrist) but on the kinesis they are directly under your thumbs. makes a huge difference: if you think about it, the thumbs are completely underused on traditional keyboards. they are the most agile/strong fingers and they’re left whacking the space bar occasionally and that’s it. Conversely, the worst placed key on the kinesis is the ESC key which is way the hell off to the top left corner. Probably not something they thought about for windows people but i spend almost all of my day inside Vim so it’s heavily used. I just use ctrl-[ which is a very natural keystroke now and basically never hit the esc key itself. YMMV (especially if you are a filthy Emacs bigot!), but I love the contour.
