Ask Slashdot: Single-Handed Keyboard Options For Coding?

First time accepted submitter dubbreak writes "I was recently injured in a car accident which will limit the use of hand for six weeks or so. I'll be taking a little time off, but deadlines march on, and I'll need to be (semi) productive after my initial recuperation. What is you experience with single handed keyboards or other input option that require one hand at most? The current project is mainly C#, so I've need to be able to type brackets, semicolons and parentheses quick and painlessly."

Comments

Vim Remapping

[TheMatt]

I broke my hand a year ago and I too had the fun of doing one-handed coding (in Fortran, baby!) for a couple months. In truth, it wasn't that bad, though my productivity was slowed a bit. I managed by remapping keystrokes in vim to be more friendly, like remapping '' to 'jj' and ':wq' to just 'wq'. If you are clever, you could easily remap shift-combos (like braces) to un-used areas. Say, remap '{' to '[['...unless C# has those. (I am not a C# programmer). It's a bit harder for '(' as you can't just remap that to '99'.

XKCD has the answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Great mods of slashdot , forgive my AC ways and mod this to +1
You can mirror the keyboard with say , the caps lock key. I tried it and you get used to it really quick because the motion is already familiar to you since you use the keyboard in a "mirrored" fashion anyway. One hand for each side.
http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard-layout-for-the-lazy/

The one I have used for a decade now....

[Lumpy]

http://www.handykey.com/

Works great and you can actually type REALLY fast with it once you get used to it.