(identity 'myron)

Sun, 02 Oct 2005

Wrist Pains [/personal]

Well, I can't say it's exactly surprising, but I've started experiencing wrist pains. Lazy wrist posture and no jiggly wrist rest probably contributed the most. Thankfully it's not so much painful as it is sore... for now. And I'm sure as hell not going to find out how bad these things can get.

I've switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout cold turkey. I tried to do this once before and got up to about 20-30 wpm, but the frustration of relearning the keys in Vi just totally turned me off. Now that I'm forced to switch for comfort reasons, it turns out it's not actually that bad. I just have to stop and think about the keys I'm hitting. It's also perfect timing since I've been going through Learning GNU Emacs, and I haven't internalized any of the key combinations yet.

That said, there are some really nice quirks about Dvorak, other than comfort:

• Along with remapping Ctrl to the Caps Lock key, Ctrl-p is now extremely easy to hit. And no this does not mean print in Unix and OS X. It's easily one of the most common key chords in the shell.
• Similarly, Ctrl-h is now as accessible as ever and is far less straining than its functional equivalent, the Backspace key. Heh, can you tell I grew up on Unix?
• For programming, the hyphen/underscore is now on the home row.

Now the list of downsides.

• The / key is now vertically opposite of where it used to be; very confusing.
• The [, ] and {, } keys are now very far which sucks for C-style syntax in programming. You could see that as a good thing though—it's another reason to avoid that class of languages.
• The h, j, k and l keys for cursor movement in Vi now make absolutely no sense at all.
• ls is now off home row, and it's even two hits with the same pinky. Booooo.

Oh well. I've always found it more comfortable, and in the end that will overrule any of its downsides.

// posted at 12:43. permalink   comments