Kian Ryan is a guide and software program engineer, which signifies that he spends plenty of time typing. A few years in the past, he suffered an harm to his left shoulder the reduces his power. He’ll want an operation to deal with that, however the operation will take his left arm out of fee for a number of months whereas he recovers. Dropping his skill to kind could be catastrophic in his line of labor, so he got down to construct a one-handed keyboard for accessible typing.
I lately had a medical process that made my very own left hand unusable for a couple of days, which is a giant deal for a author like myself. I merely needed to take break day work, however that gained’t be an possibility for Ryan as a result of the restoration will final a number of months. He wanted an answer that will let him proceed working whereas recovering.
He investigated the one-handed typing choices that have been on the market, however wasn’t glad with any of them. Chorded keyboards (like these utilized by stenographers), for instance, have a particularly steep studying curve that will be extreme for a state of affairs that’s solely short-term. Then he got here throughout FrogPad, which is analogous however depends on layers of key maps based mostly on letter frequency. Some letters are way more frequent than others, so these go on the highest layers. This retains the variety of keys down with as few layer-shifts as potential.
Ryan’s customized keyboard, impressed by the FrogBad, makes use of half of a Lily58 keyboard. One half of the break up keyboard offers 24 keys in a comparatively conventional staggered structure, plus one other 5 that the thumb can attain. It displays the keyboard matrix with a Professional Micro operating QMK firmware.
As a result of this has QMK, Ryan was in a position to configure a customized layered key map much like the FrogPad’s. It has some devoted quantity and management keys (very helpful for a programmer), with 15 keys containing alpha characters, punctuation, and so forth throughout a number of layers. Relegendable key caps let Ryan present details about the characters on every layer.
However, after all, wanting on the keyboard whereas typing could be very inefficient. So Ryan turned to some outdated pals to construct some typing proficiency along with his new keyboard. He took benefit of typing coaching video games (like many people used as youngsters), similar to Mario Teaches Typing, to get acquainted with the weird keyboard structure.
Now Ryan has all of the instruments he wants to remain productive whereas recovering from his operation.
