idiosyncratic input devices that you use

[watermoon]

a thread for those who heard Think Different and took it as a challenge

as a creature that is driven by discontent as much as by novelty, i enjoy trying out different ways of being every so often just for their own sake. one day this'll get me into hot water, but until then i like to think that it helps me to keep my brain active. but i assume that this condition has to be shared with some of the others here – otherwise why would the emacs thread here be so long when vscode works just fine?

so anyway this can be a thread to show off the weird input peripherals that you've become attached to, whether they're hardware or software.

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keynovo if98 pro, dvorak layout

i'm not sure why i decided to learn how to type dvorak as a teen. i think the desire came from wanting to type really really fast and choosing a layout that would help me do that, with some background justification that this'll decrease my chance of developing rsi years down the line. although… it mainly made me realize that, even if i am able to type at 100+ wpm, my thinking speed is much slower than that. and as for the rsi question… :')

i knew that other keyboard layouts existed around that time, with colemak having its fair share of supporters, but i opted for dvorak mostly because i figured that it would be available on more devices without needing to install a custom keymap into whatever i was using… hell, some apple ii versions had a switch to change the keyboard layout to dvorak.

as for what the experience of typing in dvorak is like… you know the master hand and crazy hand in smash? typing dvorak honestly feels like that, with the left hand staying pretty fixed while the right hand is all over the place.

and then, as i was shopping around for keyboards after my last one crapped out, i decided that i wanted one with a 1800 layout. a compact version of a full-size that only remove a handful of keys that i never used much to begin with? sure, i'll go for that… i'm sure i'll find a way to manage without the scroll lock key. the downside is that there aren't many options for 1800s, but i do like the one i ended up with. the translucent plastic reminds me of a time that i wish could've stuck around… though you still can find it in places.

elecom ex-g trackball

i saw this one recommended by natalie back when i used to roleplay as a subaru on the fediverse, and seeing it brought back memories of hanging out in my cousin's basement during the windows 98 era, where her former uncle had a whole computer nook with a likely-expensive-for-the-time setup. his computer used a trackball for movement and i thought it was so strange and cool. and since my other mouse was getting a bit fucky and this was so cheap, there'd be no harm in trying this one out.

i ended up taking to it surprisingly well? to the point where i got another one to use with my work computer? i like having a thing to move my cursor around that just stays in place, plus moving the ball around gives enough mechanical friction to make things feel natural in a way that pushing around a hunk of plastic never fully did. i feel like if i did any keyboard + mouse gaming then i would have more of an issue with its lack of quick precision, but i only really play retro console and arcade games so it doesn't bother me.

still, it being so cheap means it has its share of quality issues that came to light. my one at home has issues with clicks instantly doubleclicking and my one at work developed scrollwheel issues quite quickly (oh, and it shipped without one of the tiny guide balls that keeps the big ball stabilized and i had to buy a set of those to fix it). so i'd be interested in trying something else out, but what next? a finger trackball instead of a thumb one? that kensington one that looks like an alien artifact? that expensive one that you can hook foot pedals up to?! the… the ploopy?!

thumb-key / messagease

my first love, after rikku, after my high school crush, was the moto droid 1. it ran an early version of android that was laggy and never felt quite right, the touchscreen was much less precise than the iphone i had before, but it came with a full slide-out keyboard.

i went through two of those phones – both succumbing to water damage in somewhat-embarrassing ways – before my family switched back to iphones for good, yet ever since then i've had occasional dreams where i'd be trying to tap out a word on the touchscreen and having it come out wrong. they used to involve words autocorrecting to ones that i don't want so i turned off autocorrect, and then they started involving me being unable to press the right keys. god i hate on-screen keyboards… so much.

since i got my last phone (pixel 4a, named "Neptune"), i decided to try out gboard's glidetyping feature and i took to it pretty well. i still have to redo about one out of every ten words, and for some words it's easier to just type them out manually, but being able to slide from word to word is kinda fun!

but then i met a girl. she speaks in a way that touches my heart and carries multiple delicious types of pain that i'm attracted to and seek out – that borne by those who live one or two missteps away from ruin, that borne by those who crave love as much as they fear the exposure it entails. she's also the kind of girl who daily-drives qubes and is proud of it, so her condition is kinda telegraphed from the outset… but i think i could love her, and i want to love her in a way that counts.

so when the topic of phone inputs came up and she highly recommended using thumb-key with the messagease layout, i downloaded it that day. it looks just strange and cryptic enough to appeal to me, and the fact that it's very reminiscent of kana pad typing in japanese only made it sweeter.

messagease started as an input layout from the flipphone days, back when your options were either t9 (if your phone supported it!) or hammering on the 7 button just to make a single S. a good amount of research went into constructing a layout that minimized the travel distance between letters, and i find that it flows quite well. so far i've been able to consistently do 25+ wpm, while my equivalent with glidetyping is around 35, so if i'm able to clear that threshold then i'd consider this experiment to be a success.

i'll still probably keep gboard around for japanese input though, as thumb-key's kana pad implementation makes no logical sense and lacks word completion, making it kinda useless.

though while researching phone text inputs recently i also came across 8VIM, which absolutely looks like an alien artifact design. i spent five minutes trying to figure out how to input a single word before giving up and watching a video tutorial, and while i absolutely want to love it now that i know how it works… remember what i said earlier about rsi?

for your introjection,

[8sumint]

it's not all that unusual but i've gotten used to having a mouse with too many buttons on it.

it started years ago when i bought a logitech g604 (6 macro keys on the left side) for cheap on ebay to replace the beige microsoft one i had before that.. i could take screenshots and mute my microphone without having to hunt for the keys which was pretty slick. unfortunately after just a few years the actual mouse buttons, or well the left one specifically, started to produce spurious superfast double clicks -- i guess this is a common failure mode of the microswitches they used, whatever. i did an autohotkey script to debounce it as a stopgap measure but that caused other problems. they've discontinued it now anyway and don't do anything like it anymore so eventually i decided to replace it with a 'razer naga v2 pro', cause it was sort of expensive so i figured it would be even better. it has 12 keys on the side (double the macros!) and rgb lighting that you can't meaningfully seem to turn off. i actually wrote a whole stupid blogpost (wait a second i already wrote about this =w=) complaining about the ways that it sucks (the software is bad, the hardware is flawed). but it works /fine/ i guess.. and i like being able to printscreen and show desktop and do my media controls and open my screenshots folder and control my discord state and go backwards and forwards without having to move my hand.. [joke elided]
although the key that i use to history forward seems to be intermittent these days... sigh ■

[watermoon]

it's not all that unusual but i've gotten used to having a mouse with too many buttons on it.

it started years ago when i bought a logitech g604 (6 macro keys on the left side) for cheap on ebay to replace the beige microsoft one i had before that.. i could take screenshots and mute my microphone without having to hunt for the keys which was pretty slick. unfortunately after just a few years the actual mouse buttons, or well the left one specifically, started to produce spurious superfast double clicks -- i guess this is a common failure mode of the microswitches they used, whatever. i did an autohotkey script to debounce it as a stopgap measure but that caused other problems. they've discontinued it now anyway and don't do anything like it anymore so eventually i decided to replace it with a 'razer naga v2 pro', cause it was sort of expensive so i figured it would be even better. it has 12 keys on the side (double the macros!) and rgb lighting that you can't meaningfully seem to turn off. i actually wrote a whole stupid blogpost (wait a second i already wrote about this =w=) complaining about the ways that it sucks (the software is bad, the hardware is flawed). but it works /fine/ i guess.. and i like being able to printscreen and show desktop and do my media controls and open my screenshots folder and control my discord state and go backwards and forwards without having to move my hand.. [joke elided]
although the key that i use to history forward seems to be intermittent these days... sigh ■

oh that's really interesting… for as much as i love the idea of mice with a bunch of extra buttons, i could never find a way to meaningfully incorporate more than one extra button into my workflow, which is bound to some variant of "show all windows." but it's really cool that you're able to do so much right from the mouse.

[watermoon]

so i'd be interested in trying something else out, but what next? a finger trackball instead of a thumb one? that kensington one that looks like an alien artifact? that expensive one that you can hook foot pedals up to?! the… the ploopy?!

i ended up buying the alien artifact.

kensington slimblade trackball

…admittedly, i'm not sure whether i like this one.

the finger ball is easier to get used to than i expected and decently ergonomic to use on its own, as you can just slide your hand around it without moving your wrist much. the buttons are laid out so that you use your thumb to click and your pinky to right-click. reach up with your index finger to middle-click, reach up and around with your ring finger to access the bonus button (which i mapped to show all windows). for the most part that works intuitively too, but dragging requires you to twist your wrist in a strange way to move the cursor while keeping the button pressed down, unless you use two hands for this i guess. and i did mention that i've been having rsi issues in that hand…

the most interesting quirk is that, in lieu of a scrollwheel, you twist the ball itself to scroll. this is pretty neat and clever too, and it works well once you get the muscle memory for it down, but it's also just another control that twists the wrist. it's also starting to get a tiny bit sticky but in a way where it sounds a bit like a mourning dove when i twist it, which i find charming.

i'm not sure if i'll stick with this one in the long-run. if anything it's making me realize that i just might like thumb balls more, because honestly the only real issue i had with elecom was the build quality!

canary keyboard layout

my wrist issues are also making me reconsider whether i should keep using dvorak, as the amount of motion it asks of the right hand is starting to get to it. the easiest switch would be to colemak, since that's installed by default on just about everything now too. but every other page about it recommends going out of your way to install colemak-dh instead, and if i'm going to be installing a custom layout then shouldn't i spend some time researching what layout would be best for me? and oh dear oh god oh no

my heart¹ is encouraging me to go with canary, based on some combination of pretty good metrics, a number of recommendations and favorable reviews scattered about online (a lot talking about it being fun to type?), and probably synchronicity honestly. it does have the downside of being right-hand heavy in terms of ratio of keys pressed, but everything around the right hand looks compacted enough that it shouldn't have to move around much, and once the spacebar is taken into account then it should balance back out to even.

i figure it shouldn't take too long to get back up to speed with a bit of dedication – a couple months after my post about messagease i started being able to average 40–50 wpm, which crushes anything else that i've ever been able to do on my phone. still, i don't care about speed here so much as comfort, so we'll see what the effects of this choice are in time…


¹: the demons

[sinku]

I keep thinking about getting myself a Ploopy or some trackball just to try it out, but it would be the most pointless thing ever. It would be comfortable and maybe reap the benefits of the ergonomics, and I am really not playing any shooters anymore so my mouse isnt a necessity. But it probably wouldnt be a huge productivity boost or anything. what I REALLY wanna do is try out a twiddler. they released a new version (twiddler 4) and im so so curious about what its like. and its a wireless combination keyboard and optical mouse. I have been continuously fascinated with chording keyboards with a mind toward using them for notetaking, though I am more fixated on the engelbart style left hand on mouse, right hand on chorder, take your hands off both to use the keyboard if necessary sort of setup. I have had it in my mind to try and make a replica of an engelbart keyset for some time, with the touch sensitive pads instead of keys and everything.

[watermoon]

I keep thinking about getting myself a Ploopy or some trackball just to try it out, but it would be the most pointless thing ever. It would be comfortable and maybe reap the benefits of the ergonomics, and I am really not playing any shooters anymore so my mouse isnt a necessity. But it probably wouldnt be a huge productivity boost or anything. what I REALLY wanna do is try out a twiddler. they released a new version (twiddler 4) and im so so curious about what its like. and its a wireless combination keyboard and optical mouse. I have been continuously fascinated with chording keyboards with a mind toward using them for notetaking, though I am more fixated on the engelbart style left hand on mouse, right hand on chorder, take your hands off both to use the keyboard if necessary sort of setup. I have had it in my mind to try and make a replica of an engelbart keyset for some time, with the touch sensitive pads instead of keys and everything.

at least for me, i don't consider it pointless because each of these decisions was made because the last thing i was using broke – if not all the way, then enough to make life less convenient. still, i believe that comfort is a worthwhile goal to optimize for. your hands are important, after all! they're useful!

maining a chording keyboard does sound cool as hell though…

[watermoon]

canary keyboard layout

i guess, since it's been a month, i might as well report in. for funsies!

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i've been using monkeytype to both learn the layout and test my speed. most of my practice now is done on the english 1k word bank with 25 words as the completion goal.

for reference, when i tried this out with dvorak beforehand, i would average about 85wpm, and on a good roll i'd hit 100+.

the first week or so was spent learning the layout bit by bit: the home keys, then the home row, then the keys that are just above the fingers' natural resting position, then the ones below, and then work in the ones i need to reach for. monkeytype's custom settings are quite nice for this, letting you filter word banks to include only specific letters, and it even has support for automatically setting these up for canary!

my original plan was to keep using dvorak at work and canary at home, but after coming back to work after maining canary all weekend (and also buying a pretty new keyboard to replace the half-broken one i was using there), i instantly realized that my dvorak muscle memory had been shredded to bits. ah well, guess i'm going all-in now.

right now, i seem to have plateaued at around 45 wpm for the past week. i surpassed 50 once, but it turned out to be a fluke.

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typing is a strange thing to relearn because, typically, it feels subconscious. you think about what you want to write, and your fingers just move by themselves to get the words onto the screen. and so in order to reach any level of fluency, you need to get back to where you can offload this process back onto the subconscious mind. but your hands already know where they're supposed to go!

and retraining them seems to have progressed in stages: first with them wanting to go back to dvorak and consciously telling them to go elsewhere, then with them getting extra-confused and returning to the qwerty locations every so often (?!), and now being mostly retrained but having a strange number of off-by-one errors…

canary having its vowels all on the right hand vs. dvorak having all its vowels all on the left hand was a serious mindfuck for a while, and while it still gives me issues every so often, since these ones are used so much it also was more easily rewritten than i was expecting. rare characters and punctuation still give me trouble, but i was expecting this one, since whenever i need to use qwerty for something i typo these more often than not.

another surprising find was that vim bindings were a lot easier to retrain than i was expecting. i still rebound the motion keys to be split between both hands – almost a necessity since hjkl are in godawful positions to use normally – but the keys that i rebound for it ("st-ne" or nest uwu) don't clobber much of what i actually use. it's even maybe a bit comfier this way!

is this layout fun to type in? i'm still not sure, though at some points i can feel what they're going for and it makes me want to get better at it. but it still feels strange to be hobbled in this way: even if where i am now is still apparently above-average in the grand scheme of things, i still feel like i lost some amount of fluency in my expression.

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in short, i fucked myself up and can no longer type very well anymore, but i'm too far in to stop now, right?¹

¹ This is turning out to be a common theme within watermoon's life…