[9fans] keyboards and mice and pads

[9fans] keyboards and mice and pads

[Michael Baldwin]

maybe getting a bit off topic, but i notice that many people really
dislike trackpads. i thought i would, but it turned out that i really
like it. the fact that it's under my thumbs means i don't have to
move my hands hardly at all (yes, i use my left and right thumbs on
it often). i use the scrolling feature on my PowerBook too (two
fingers at once scrolls, both up/down and left/right) all the time,
to the point that i hardly use scroll bars, which seem antique now. i
use tap for click / double-click / drag and i find that very fast. i
don't use acme much at all, but i can even chord with the 3 buttons
to the left of the space bar, and that's not bad either. anyone else
find track/scroll pads useful? i see many people with external mice
but i've never felt any need to get one.

i also switched my keyboard to dvorak years ago. at first i actually
moved the keys to train myself, but now i just leave it qwerty and
type away in dvorak. one reason i switched was that my wrist was
getting sore -- certainly switching keyboards slows you down! i
actually do know a few people with carpal that swear that dvorak is
much better, and there are good reasons for that. but really, i was
just curious about what it took to switch layouts in my brain. these
days i'm just as fast with dvorak and of course i almost never look
at the keyboard, which wouldn't help much (the core keyboard
punctuation moves around too).

the most fascinating thing i found was that i have multiple layouts
in my brain, for different purposes. i was shocked when i went to the
shell command line and typed the command "kill", and i used the
qwerty layout! if i type the same characters "kill" in an English
language context, it comes out in dvorak. so it's not the letters,
it's how my brain is thinking about them that determines how i type.
my shell and programming fingers are still mostly in qwerty mode
because i haven't retrained them (alas, not much programming these
days), but my prose fingers are so dvorak now that if i try to use
qwerty for typing sentences i am much slower (i intentionally
unlearned it). on small keyboards like my treo, i use my thumbs, and
they can type in qwerty just fine. i find this all quite interesting.
i had no idea i had different layouts stored by intent of text and
size of keyboard in my brain.

now, i do play the piano; i learned *that* keyboard long before a
typewriter. maybe that's why i am pretty good at pads and different
layouts and not looking and moving my hands around and using
different fingers (you *never* look at the keyboard when playing the
piano, and you reach a *long* way to hit keys, and talk about
chording!). maybe everyone should learn to play piano first.