I bought a ZSA Moonlander a few years ago and it went a bit like this:
1. Unpack and immediately set up a Colemak-DH layout. Customize the layout twice a day for 4 months. This is PAINFUL, slow and unproductive.
2. Got comfortable with Colemak and stopped doing any typing exercises. Still tweaking my layout.
3. Didn’t know where to position my mouse, so I got an Apple Trackpad 2 that sits beautifully between the two halves. Works great on Linux. Keep the mouse around for gaming.
4. Finally productive. I make minor changes to my layout every 6 months. Colemak is ingrained in my muscle memory. It’s just so comfortable.
And don’t worry about forgetting how to type QWERTY; the secret to retain muscle memory is that an ortholinear split keyboard is sufficiently different from a regular one that it’s like learning a completely new instrument. Hard at first, but it would be hard even if the layout was familiar; might as well then switch to something better than QWERTY.
I love my split keyboard now. Games are a bit annoying but I can easily switch to my gaming-QWERTY-hybrid layout (QWERTY on the left hand, colemak w/ tweaks on the right). Specialist tools like Blender might need minor rebinding to find comfort.
When I type on a regular laptop, I find shift+numbers for symbols to be hilariously unergonomic compared to my symbol layer, I don’t know how the hell people cope doing Rust or Haskell or even Lisp.
1. Unpack and immediately set up a Colemak-DH layout. Customize the layout twice a day for 4 months. This is PAINFUL, slow and unproductive.
2. Got comfortable with Colemak and stopped doing any typing exercises. Still tweaking my layout.
3. Didn’t know where to position my mouse, so I got an Apple Trackpad 2 that sits beautifully between the two halves. Works great on Linux. Keep the mouse around for gaming.
4. Finally productive. I make minor changes to my layout every 6 months. Colemak is ingrained in my muscle memory. It’s just so comfortable.
And don’t worry about forgetting how to type QWERTY; the secret to retain muscle memory is that an ortholinear split keyboard is sufficiently different from a regular one that it’s like learning a completely new instrument. Hard at first, but it would be hard even if the layout was familiar; might as well then switch to something better than QWERTY.
I love my split keyboard now. Games are a bit annoying but I can easily switch to my gaming-QWERTY-hybrid layout (QWERTY on the left hand, colemak w/ tweaks on the right). Specialist tools like Blender might need minor rebinding to find comfort.
When I type on a regular laptop, I find shift+numbers for symbols to be hilariously unergonomic compared to my symbol layer, I don’t know how the hell people cope doing Rust or Haskell or even Lisp.