Week 1 report⌗

Sooo it’s been a week since the last Moonlander update and I have some things to say about it.

The week started off great, but as the days went by I started to feel like my wrist pain ramped up again, and it went to new hights… It wasn’t what I expected, but after some digging I managed to solve the issue.

For context, I suffer some pains on my left wrist whenever I press some key with my pinky so things like pressing and holding Shift or Ctrl were killing me. That was something I thought I would solve with this keyboard right away, but that wasn’t the case. Turns out that since I tried to replicate my old keyboard’s layout, Shift and Ctrl were on the same place, so the pinky needed to do the same work as before. The solution?

  • Getting rid of those pesky left side keys and route them somewhere else.
  • Learn to actually use a keyboard.

Remapping the keys⌗

Since this keyboard is highly customizable, remapping is 100% possible and I started trying some different configs. First I tried setting setting the Shift key on the red keys on the thumb cluster. It was nice and all but I wasn’t getting used to it as quickly as I wanted. Lurking around the configurator, I found the Auto-Shift feature. Essentially, if you hold the key for a set amount of milliseconds (currently 150), the key gets shifted. Since turning on this feature, I don’t think I have used the left pinky at all…

This feature is great and all but on Normal mode Vim (which I use daily and for several hours), I’m used to hold HJKL to move arund, but that wasn’t working that well, since of course we are getting the uppercase letters. To solve this, I have set a toggle switch for Auto-Shifting, which solves the issue quite nicely.

Remapping my brain⌗

Turns out, I have been using a keyboard wrong throughout my whole life! You are supposed to use the wrist support ocasionally to rest, but my wrists were sitting there all the time. This caused my wrist to pivot (instead of my elbow), which as a result gave me some more pain!

Most of my pain came from pivoting my left wrist to the left and then hitting a key with my pinky but as it turns out, you are supposed to hover your hands over the keyboard while typing…

I felt like such an idiot when yesterday, after not using my pinky and hovering my hands, I didn’t feel any pain compared to the previous days.

A foreword⌗

On Tuesday I brought the keyboard to the office and one senior coworker told me something interesting: “Be careful with messing around with keyboard layots. Once you are in, coming back to a default one becomes impossible”. That very same day, and after having used the keyboard for only a few days, I tried the default laptop keyboard and to no one’s surprise, I couldn’t do shit, so keep that in mind if you are considering the purchase LOL.

Conclusion⌗

Don’t use the pinky. Use the keyboard as it should be used. Pray that you don’t need to use a defult layout again.