Re: New Kinesis

Hello,

I also have a Kinesis Advantage, and noticed your comment about its
crappy F-keys:

> I'm not entirely happy with Kinesis's decision to make the F-keys
> nasty squishy small keys, but a particular warning to vi users: they
> did the same thing to the Escape key. Which you may have been astute
> enough to notice, but I wasn't. 

Remember that it is a programmable keyboard. If you don't like where the
F-keys are, then reprogram it! You could simply use macro combinations
to place the F-keys in better spots. For instance page-up + 1 = F1 and
Home + 8  =  F8. I am considering doing this with my Kinesis, but
haven't done it yet as I very rarely use the F-keys anyway. You have
between 24 and 48 macros to play with, depending on your settings.
That's more than enough to create macros to remap all the F-keys, as
well as escape, print screen, scroll lock, and pause/break.

As for the speed, it only took me 8 days to surpass my typing speed on a
standard keyboard. I use Dvorak on both, standard and Kinesis,
keyboards. I can type at well over 80wpm on the Kinesis mapped to
Dvorak. I've clocked myself at over 130wpm for very brief bursts, and
110wpm for sequences of common words.

I don't feel the same way as you about the thumbs. The only keys that
are commonly used that get re-assigned to the thumbs are the backspace
and the enter keys. The rest of the keys: home/end, pageup/pagedown, and
delete are not used all that often (at least in my personal usage). I
actually remapped the enter key to where the delete key is by default.
That way I type both enter and backspace with my left thumb. I find
that, even then, the right thumb does much more work than the left
thumb. The spacebar accounts for about 20% of all keystrokes. In
contrast the enter key accounts for around 5% of keystrokes in my usage.
The backspace is used about as much as the enter key (maybe a little
more). So overall, I would estimate that my right thumb is still doing
like 20% of the work, while the left one only gets around 10%.

But I love the fact that the commonly used backspace and enter keys are
right there in a comfortable place. When I use a standard keyboard, it
feels so awkward to have to reach so far, and so often, for the enter,
backspace and arrow keys.

Regards.