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by gtrevorjay 853 days ago
I won't lie, straight-up prose is much slower. I can just about break 120 wpm with a full QWERTY whereas I can only do roughly 40-45 single-handed. Typing passwords sucks.

The big 'however' here is coding. I also have a one-handed mouse from Elecom. Not switching between mouse and keyboard to navigate, combined with macros being less strain (basically no hand travel and sticky meta keys) means I'm faster editing code to the point I just eat the prose cost (or use my phone keyboard/dictation to compose longer prose).
2 comments
throwup238 853 days ago
As far as prose goes, that's not that bad - I was expecting a 5-10x slowdown.

How much do you use the mouse when navigating? Do you have something akin to vim combos or do you use mostly mouse? What kind of macros do you have?

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gtrevorjay 853 days ago
Yeah, I was introduced to the Twiddler in the context of robot interfaces and while I can't find the study now, there were a couple showing that eventually the slowdown is down to the extra movement, which is almost exactly x3 on most chorded systems.

I use the mouse almost exclusively now, to the point going back to search/word/character navigation when a terminal won't pass mouse events feels excruciating.

Macros are mostly code refactoring in emacs. Things like moving blocks between brackets, repainting, stuff like that. These really benefit from sticky keys. No letter is closer or further from super, hyper, or alt because I hit the chord for the meta key and then the one for letter.

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yjftsjthsd-h 853 days ago
> Not switching between mouse and keyboard to navigate,

I found the opposite solution also works:D A combination of keynav, a tiling window manager, and ex. vimium[0] make reaching for the mouse pretty much optional:)

[0] The key feature is a hotkey to quickly select links with the keyboard.

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