Kian Ryan is a advisor and software program engineer, which signifies that he spends lots of time typing. A few years in the past, he suffered an harm to his left shoulder the reduces his energy. He’ll want an operation to handle that, however the operation will take his left arm out of fee for a number of months whereas he recovers. Shedding his means to sort 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 number of days, which is an enormous deal for a author like myself. I merely needed to take day without work 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 non permanent. Then he got here throughout FrogPad, which has similarities 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 doable.
Ryan’s customized keyboard, impressed by the FrogBad, makes use of half of a Lily58 keyboard. One half of the break up keyboard gives 24 keys in a comparatively conventional staggered format, plus one other 5 that the thumb can attain. It displays the keyboard matrix with a Professional Micro working QMK firmware.
As a result of this has QMK, Ryan was in a position to configure a customized layered key map just 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 previous pals to construct some typing proficiency along with his new keyboard. He took benefit of typing coaching video games (like many people used as kids), akin to Mario Teaches Typing, to get accustomed to the bizarre keyboard format.
Now Ryan has all of the instruments he wants to remain productive whereas recovering from his operation.