Edit: found that functionality. Nice!

As a side, I switched to Dvorak when I first bought my Moonlander about 6 years ago. I have only used split keyboards with Dvorak, and I have only used traditional staggered keyboards with QWERTY. My muscle memory is well isolated between the two, and I have no trouble switching between them (though as it has now been many years since I regularly used a physical QWERTY keyboard, my WPM on one is definitely lower than it used to be).

If you like tactile switches, try the Golden Kiwi from MoErgo [1] (also Choc v1, so fits the Voyager). It pulled of the near-impossible combination of a profound tactile bump, with only 42gf tactile force, while being much smoother and silent than Browns or Sunsets.

Only disclaimer I should add is that I was one of the beta testers for the switch. But I can't go back to anything else.

[1] https://www.moergo.com/pages/go60-key-switches

https://www.moergo.com/products/pre-order-ships-from-usa-kai...

I've had dozens of keyboards in my PC life, so far. The earliest examples were Chicony clicky-mechanical boards in the late nineteen-eighties. Those were pretty cool (and they're very much NLA).

I've had innumerable membrane keyboards. Some were more useful than others. I had a very long and pleasant run of membrane boards made by NMB, which were good while they lasted.

Over the past 5 years or so, I've been mostly using boards with Cherry MX Blue switches -- assembled by whomever. Those worked fine, too.

And lately, in the past month or two, I replaced the one at home with a keyboard that uses Hall effect sensors for each key in place of any kind of conventional electrical switch. It's been fine; in fact, it's been quite lovely so far. It's a joy to type with.

---

I haven't named any keyboard makers here except for 1980s-era Chicony and PS/2 era NMB. Some of my keyboards have been good, some have been great, and some others have been trash.

That's my background.

What's yours?

What makes ZSA deserve "so much love"? Can you elaborate?

- Generally high quality boards. I expect to be using my ZSA boards for decades. - Uses open, standard, programmable firmware (qmk). - They have fostered a community around their boards (importantly making it easy to share and discover layouts and promoting 3D printable accessories). - I have found their live support team to be very accessible and knowledgable.

It's hard not to be biased having spent >$700 on keyboards from them, feeling the need to justify my purchases a bit. At their prices it's easy to find high quality boards elsewhere or build your own board on open tech, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find similar offerings both with such excellent support from the company and such a vibrant community.

(I did look at their website earlier and the details of what I found seemed to get wrapped up in the tiny details of some low-profile keyswitch or other. It's also possible that I am unobservant, stupid, or otherwise inept and that I missed the main concept, but that's what I found and I didn't think it was very interesting.)

I landed on the Ambients Twilight silent switches https://lowprokb.ca/collections/switches/products/ambients-s...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/zsa-moonlander-2ACNkDc

I've been using my Glove 80 ever since. But the Voyager was a nice step and I still keep it on my desk.

They also have self-assembly kits where you solder it together yourself. That’s what I did, the instructions were great!

I also completely unbound the outermost row of keys on both sides. i.e. far left and far right. Since I found one of the biggest issues I had that aggravated my issues were stretching the pinky.

I also have a Kinesis Advantage 360 pro but I think its better suited for people with bigger hands than me. I do prefer its tenting setup though since its much quicker/easier to use. The Glove80's is a bit more custom but I think I'd have preferred if there was like a good mix of the two.

Hoping and praying for columnar laptops one of these days

Mostly similar for me, but I never considered that the fact that I’m able to pretty comfortably switch between using my laptop keyboard which is QWERTY, and my external USB keyboard which is Dvorak based, even when not having used one or the other for quite some time might actually be helped by as you say that they are two different kinds of keyboards with different feel.

I also retained my ability and speed typing QWERTY by continuing to use it on a standard keyboard the majority of the time. Really, I just kept practicing the alt layout by typing out articles and books on the ortho and a laptop. At this point I think I'll maintain muscle memory for vi/emacs in QWERTY and switch on the fly to the alt layout for long entries.

I use Miryoku style meta keys, and layers for arrows, home-page(up/down)-end, mouse-keys, scroll-wheel, numpad, symbols, media, and F-keys. I'm thinking of adding combos for international letters and symbols next. backspace-delete and enter-space+tab are under thumbs like a Kinesis. Escape is a left hand combo. I also set a lock function for the layers with tap+hold and release with a designated key -- it works great with numpad, scroll, mouse, and arrows. I'd like to add a rotory dial.

For switches, I enjoy the light action Kailh box whites that came with my split, but I'd like to try out some silent low-pro ones for travel and more comfort. I have a second ortho with a number row and much heavier linear ones that I'm getting used to; so far it works great and I have more planned for it.

On a regular keyboard I've found mapping the capslock key to be a second backspace is much more ergonomic. I use it in conjunction with Ctrl to delete the previous word and then retype.

We can adapt (steal) this idea (thanks vibe coding) and practice our own topcis of interest and learning daily!

https://monkeytype.com/

[0] - https://github.com/rdavison/graphite-layout

Assuming you can already type that fast, 3-6 months at most I would think (with daily practice / full immersion). My best speed with QWERTY was 160wpm and I was able to get to 120wpm+ with Dvorak and later Workman in under a year each. One big tip I have is to not avoid typing particular things. Enable the punctuation, symbols, numbers. You're gonna be slow at everything at first, so might as well train in a well-rounded way. A friend of mine chose not to do this and struggles greatly with typing numbers and symbols. monkeytype is my favorite site to train speed, but there are some others that are useful for the first few days as you're drilling where the keys are and getting used to typing common bigrams.

https://www.typelit.io/chapters/War_and_Peace

I used to feel so smug about using Dvorak. Now it feels so outdated.

It's amazing how much easier gamification can make it for me to stick with something.

And two - does anyone know of a keyboard that has some-trackpad-like (or pure scrolling..?) device pretty much where the trackpad would be on a laptop?

I spend time working on my laptop, get used to scrolling / moving the mouse "under" the keyboard (ie closer to me) using the trackpad, and when I go back to my desk with my full sized keyboard, I see myself reaching for a phantom trackpad.

Thanks!

It does some, uh, interesting things with the Dark Reader extension, though, at least with the default light theme darkened by Dark Reader. Errors are displayed. Corrections are highlighted. But there's no cursor shown, and no progress displayed for completed input.

It felt very strange typing like that. I somehow managed to get 65 wpm in that mode, but it was weird the whole time -- like my eye/brain combo had to focus on only one word at a time, without any lookahead, since I was typing into the void. It felt arduous in ways that are otherwise difficult to describe.

Switching to the site's dark theme and turning off Dark Reader seemed so much better, and was much faster. I got a fairly-lazy 88 wpm on the first go with it running with its intended level of feedback.

But the interesting part is that I was able to notice that my eyes wander all over the place while typing. I found that I looking several words ahead, and scanning the context, and watching the progress, and that my eyes don't move linearly at all.

I suppose that's a thing that I've been doing for decades. But I definitely never noticed it until Dark Reader made this website unintentionally run on hard mode and thereby provided a contrasting experience.

Weird stuff. I'm reluctant to call it a bug; instead, it seems like maybe it is a feature that could be further developed. It might help to train for accurately entering long arbitrary phrases (like passphrases, license keys, and credit card numbers) where visual feedback is deliberately limited.

19.80% Accuracy

320 Errors

Thinkpad keyboard.

it’s been a while since I used it but I recall it being good at targeting certain patterns that you struggled with.

It has worked really well for me

  Today’s typ.ing:
  Speed: 420wpm
  Accuracy: 100.00%
  Training Set: Onboarding
  Keyboard damage 12%
  Capitalization:   Numbers:   Punctuation:

I think a typing tutor is better if it can re-sync when you have an insertion or deletion error. That is, if you miss one letter but everything else is correct, or if you mash an extra letter but everything else is correct, that is one error, not a full list of errors. It is distracting to have to look at your output to make sure you didn't make one of these mistakes.

Why don’t these programs use some form of edit distance? I’m sure that one could come up with a way to freeze the edit beyond some distance from the caret to reduce the potential for spooky UI action at a distance.

Two spaces in monospace font is larger than the typical historical typeset sentence spacing, so it's always been somewhat misguided.

Look at any printed media from the last 100 years. Printing presses, books, magazines, newspaper.

A double space offers a visual clue where a 'mental breath' takes place.

I have, and it contradicts your point. The single space is the nearly universal standard in modern print media.

edit: monospaced, not proportional.

Stylistic recommendations can also be taken as rules, but in limited situations, such as a place of work saying we follow these guidelines (a manual of recommendations), which then become rules for that workplace.

Finally this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing shows that their complaint has some merit, because the spacing used are not rules of the language, but conventions or recommendations imposed to improve the production of text based on the requirements and limitations of a particular technology.

on edit: probably shouldn't describe capitalization as being a linguistic rule, as it is an orthographic rule...heat of the moment, sorry. One might argue that the same applies to spacing, but I suppose that capitalization in orthography has been established for so long, and in so many different systems that it can be claimed a rule whereas spacing is still just a recommendation.

One idea is letting you press enter to jump to the start of the next word and immediately resume.

Did you know about

https://zty.pe/

It's a pretty old one at this point, but fantastic implementation

I don't really know about that. I think the point is to practice typing, and that may or may not reflect how you type in everyday life. For example, most people don't spend their time typing random words without numbers or punctuation :)

In any case, are you saying that if you correct a word during one of these tests, it simply should not count as a mistake? Because if not, then I don't see what the problem is again - typ.ing and most other sites note corrections, and distinguish between corrected and uncorrected mistakes.

If so, I guess we might just disagree on what the point of these exercises is.

Full stops should mean something dammit! (/s)

https://www.kcoleman.me/vietnamese-typing/

I never had any dedicated typing classes like I know some younger people get now (like my younger brothers), so I just learned by doing and while I could touch type I had a bastardized technique that had my hands flying around all over the keyboard.

Nowadays, I type around 20-30 WPM lower, going down from closer to 120 to 140 to closer to consistently 90 to 100, but my technique is completely different than the past.

Finally