After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control the shoulder, arm, and hand. This resulted in numbness and paralysis in his right shoulder and arm, with the prognosis being a partial recovery at best. As a writer, this meant facing the most visceral fear possible of writing long-form content no longer being possible. While searching for solutions, [Kurt] looked at various options, including speech-to-text (STT), before focusing on single-handed keyboard options.
More after the break…
The reason why STT didn’t really work was simple: beyond simple emails and short messages, the voice-driven process just becomes too involved and tedious with editing, rearranging, and deleting of text fragments. [Kurt] couldn’t see himself doing a single-pass narration of an article text or dealing with hours of dictating cursor movements.
One of the first single-hand typing methods he tried is as simple as it’s brilliant: by moving the functional hand a few keys over (e.g. left hand’s index finger on J instead of F), you can access all keys with a single hand. This causes a lot more stress on the good hand, though. Thus, for a long-term solution, something else would be needed.
Thanks to his state loan program (MNStar), [Kurt] was able to try out Maltron’s ‘Key Bowl’, the TIPY ‘Big Fan’, and the Matias Half-QWERTY keyboard, which describes pretty much what they look like. Of these, the Maltron was functional but very clunky, the TIPY required learning a whole new keyboard layout, something which [Kurt] struggled with. Despite its mere 22 keys, the Matias half-QWERTY offered the most straightforward transition from using a full keyboard.
It was the Matias keyboard that worked the best for [Kurt], as it allowed him to use both his left hand normally, along with adapting the muscle memory of his right hand to the left one. Although [Kurt] didn’t select the Matias in the end, it did inspire him to choose the fourth option: using a custom keymap on his full-sized QWERTY keyboard. In the remaining two parts in this series, Kurt] takes us through the design of this keymap along with how others can set it up and use it.
Our own [Bil Herd] found himself on a similar quest after losing a finger to a ladder accident.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip.
As someone who has worked a lot with single-handed keyboard applications (photo editing) and has adjusted many hotkey maps to make them work I can very much relate to this project. Apps like Photoshop or darktable have really awful defaults when it comes to usability. And if you spend 8 hours a day with those you either suffer or take action. I will surely take a deep dive into his setup, it sounds awesome and might be an awesome solution for typing keywords and captions.
It’s a mystery to me, how someone could develop a photo editing application and NOT put all of the shortcuts on the left-hand keys. I’ve done this myself with an animation application, and it makes for very fast drawing.
Just dropping in to say, these older ThinkPad keyboards are bulletproof and extremely comfortable to type on. I love these!
Also wondering how much global productivity would we gain if only a single layout and style and size of keyboard was legal to manufacture. 1984 tier thought, but still :D
What we’d gain, we’d also lose. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all soluion. You’d first have to outlaw the existence of people who cannot use the one solution, and also the few people who can use some other solution to massively outperform the average person and the chosen solution.
Speech to text in it’s default form are indeed suboptimal. By talking to an AI/LLM and having that producte the text, the experience can be greatly improved, there a various sites/products that are optimized for converting spoken text to a clear peace of text.
“clear peace of text” is a perfect example of the problem with using AI to do speech-to-text.
I type one-handed all the time, usually with my left hand, and never thought of the punctuation as being difficult. What gets me is that a lot of modern mechanical keyboards replace one of the super/windows/option keys with a function key, and I have a lot of key bindings that use the super key, so I end up needing to reach all the way across the keyboard to press a key combination. Fortunately I have enough reach to do so, but otherwise it would be really annoying, because it’s the only key on both sides of the keyboard that isn’t usually mapped to anything within any applications.
I think that modifiers like shift, control, and alt should be programmed to work like the shift key on my smartphone, where if you click it once, it applies to the next keypress only, and if you double-click it, it locks until clicked once more. I think this would facilitate one-handed typing on an otherwise standard keyboard. How often do you need to press two or more Alt-combos in a row?
Windows has “sticky keys” that do exactly that
I created the 3D printable Quirkey for just this purpose in 2016 https://www.printables.com/model/704535 based on the Microwriter typing system from the 80’s. Doesn’t need any arm or shoulder movement, and the fingers don’t move from over their assigned keys. Standard USB kbd device, full user manual and technical package, GPL/GFDL, CAD and firmware on GitHub.
So many one handed typists/pornhub subscribers…
Type or wank with both hands.
Don’t multitask.
You don’t want to accidently reset your sexuality to ‘troll’ (attracted to forum trolls).
Don’t multitask? What about applications where you are constantly using your mouse? These are greatly enhanced by moving all of the shortcuts (where possible) to left-hand keys, or at least keys that can be realistically reached with the left hand, allowing you to keep the right hand on the mouse. Or are you just flexing, implying that you need two hands to wank?
You should find a better name for your dick.
‘Mouse’ isn’t great.
‘Mr. Natural’ is taken BTW.