I had a revelation this week that probably belongs in a blog post, but I don’t have a blog. Is there a thread that’s dedicated to somewhat high-level realizations, theories, or convictions? If not, why not a topic called “Pensées”?
The realization is: my approach to keyboards for the last five years has been completely misguided. It turns out, I’m not sure ergos are for me. But the reason why was unexpected enough that it took me some time to understand it.
Although I don’t struggle with RSI, ergos caught my attention in 2020 because the idea of improving efficiency appealed to me. It started with a Planck, then I got into split boards with column stagger. And the stories are true: they’re more comfortable if you type with all ten fingers. I also learned to type with Dvorak, and I found that this too lives up to the hype: my fingers stay on the home row more, there’s a nice alternation between left and right hand, and typing is just more effortless. Finally, I learned to use QMK and ZMK to implement features like home-row mods.
Everything worked! Column-stagger is an improvement, Dvorak is an improvement, home-row mods and layers are an improvement.
As a chyrosran22 fan, I’m used to hearing people rant about ergo hardware and software not working. It’s unintuitive, it’s bizarre, oh, and it isn’t even proven to be more efficient. But having bought my first standard keyboard in five years last week, and comparing the experience with all my other custom boards, I’ve realized something: what I find wanting about ergos is not that they don’t work, it’s that they do.
They make everything more efficient. They minimize movement. Maximize speed. You can just focus on your work, as the keyboard just kind of disappears… and that’s the problem. I don’t want the keyboard to disappear. I’m in the hobby because I think keyboards are fun.
It turns out, movement is fun, inefficiency is fun, effort is fun. I don’t want my fingers glued to the home row; I want them flying all over the place. I want to reach over here, reach over there. I want to hear the dramatically different resonance of this very wide space bar and that isolated escape key. I don’t want a minimalist typing experience; I want a maximalist typing experience. I want a feast for the senses.
So, as strange as it is, most of all for me, I’m kind of back to where I was in 2020. Back to QWERTY, back to row-stagger, and back to almost no software customization. Bizarre.
I’ve had hobbies before where I’m interested in a tool or something on the conceptual level, and because working on it is an interesting challenge. But I don’t necessarily enjoy using the thing a ton myself. Ergos might be in that category for me now.