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Ask Slashdot: Keyboard Layout To Reduce Right Pinky/Ring Finger Usage?
Tooke writes "I've developed focal hand dystonia from playing clarinet. It affects my right pinky (and my ring finger, but to a lesser extent). My pinky isn't totally unusable when typing; however, it isn't nearly as agile as it used to be. When I must press a key with it, I tend to keep the whole finger rigid and move my entire hand instead. I also use my ring finger to press the P and semicolon keys (on QWERTY) which is a bit awkward but better than using the pinky. Thus my question: are there any keyboard layouts that are optimized to reduce right pinky/ring finger usage? I switched to Programmer Dvorak a few years ago, but Dvorak seems to make me use my right hand significantly more than my left. I'm considering mirroring the letter keys so my left hand would be used more. I also came across the Workman layout which looks interesting. I might try using that after switching the numbers and symbols around to be more like Programmer Dvorak. Has anyone been in a similar situation? What else could I do to make typing more comfortable? I've got a long career ahead of me as a programmer (I'm currently a high school senior) and I'd like to take care of my hands as much as possible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#One-handed_versions
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Working around a treatable condition is pretty silly. How about just treating the dystonia? Standard treatment is sensorimotor retraining.
How exactly is your Dystonia affecting your typing? Focal Task Specific Dystonia, by definition, rarely affects tasks other than those where the the symptoms originate. What treatments have you been seeking to deal with your dystonic symptoms? There are several potential treatments. It seems more productive to deal with your symptoms, rather than try to work around them. I'm a member of the Performing Arts Medicine Association, and can recommend several authors/doctors if you are interested. There are also several treatments you could try without medical supervision/assistance.
I almost never use my ring or pinky while typing, on either side.
Just type so that it feels natural to you. Nothing forces you to use any specific fingers.
Because I learned to type in such a "natural" form, instead of learning home rows and specific zones for each finger, I find I can easily adapt to different typing positions and injuries. Eg, if my index finger on either hand had a cut on it, it only takes a few minutes for me to adjust and type at a near full speed without that finger.
While I'm not the -fastest- typer around, I still type pretty damn fast and with little fatigue.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Who knew that learning to reed in school could be harmful.
You can try with a single-hand maltron keyboard. I have used the two-hand version and it is quite comfortable for me.
http://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/single-hand-keyboards.html
Can't you just move your hands all around the keyboard?
I often do that, and type at about 90 words per minute. I'll type both code and prose without using the little finger on my right hand at all, and the ring finger only rarely. It feels much better to have my whole hands flying all over the keyboard. Fixed wrist position always seemed terrible to me from an RSI perspective.
Simplest solution I can think of is to map right alt to enter (which I would do even without injury anyway), and then some comfortable substitution for p, ; and /. Some candidate keys would be capslock and tilde, or probably better some chording combinations like left alt o, l and .
The best solution might involve buying a Kinesis Contoured, which should save stress from pinkies on both hands as it has an extended thumb keywell.
You can use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. First, important keys are pressed with the thumb, not the right fingers (Enter, Ctrl, Backspace). Second, the keyboard is programmable, so you can map all problematic keys to the left side and type them together with AltGr (right ALT). I am already using this method, because our national characters take the place of almost every symbol characters, which are important for coding. It is working well.
No joke. Look at the below picture--the pinky is so under-utilized in QWERTY it looks looks like it has been cut off in the diagram!
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo/fig4.jpg
But really, probably any decently-designed keyboard layout spreads the workload relatively evenly across the fingers. Dvorak does use the pinky and ring fingers quite a bit though, as a result of its design to favor the right hand. I have switched from QWERTY to Dvorak back in early December, and am currently learning Colemak as a second layout... I haven't used Colemak enough to come to a personal opinion on its finger usage, but from what I read it's pretty well evenly split between the fingers.
Maybe you could go to the CarpalX site and download the program, try setting it up to minimize the use of those fingers and run it yourself to see what it generates. The pre-made fully-optimized CarpalX layouts would probably be of little use, because they were not designed to avoid those fingers at all costs... they were made with the idea of having eight fully-functional fingers, while only slightly reducing the load on those fingers due to their natural weakness.
Check out this tool to get a nice overview of the hand, finger, row, etc. usage and other stats that might be useful:
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/
You have a disability that affects your ability to work.
Go on Disability.
Sue the Clarinet maker and anyone who ever encouraged you to play Clarinet for the difference between your SSDI checks and whatever you would have made as a programmer, including any and all attorney fees and court costs.
Maybe even go for treble damages (har har) since whomever is responsible for forcing you to play clarinet either knew or should have known that there was a significant risk of a permanent disabling injury, and was therefore grossly negligent in placing your entire lifetime career in unreasonable jeopardy.
Then, you won't need to worry about keyboard layouts.
I lost the use of my left pinky in a childhood accident. After I graduated and starting programming professionally I found that the lifeless finger really interfered with my typing. So I quit programming and became a gangster. After a few years I got involved in the lucrative black market whale meat trade, necessitating a move to Japan. Fifteen years on I was, despite my lily-white ass, trusted by the locals and initiated as a full yakuza. The next day I called the boss a cunt and he required me to cut off my left pinky to atone.
Finally rid of the useless digit I moved back to the States and resumed my career as a programmer. Don't be wasting your time with non-standard keyboards.
Speaking as someone who's still struggling with the extensor tendinitis he developed as a young programmer over 15 years ago, with hundreds of nights of pain and hundreds of thousands in lost earnings as a result...
First: It's a natural hacker impulse to focus on keyboard layouts and hardware and other fun toys like that. Resist that urge. The importance of that stuff is tiny compared to good overall ergonomic habits, good posture, taking breaks, and managing tension. Get all the help that you can on those issues. Watch your own habits. Have someone else watch you. Make adjustments.
Second: Having said that... when I was first having hand trouble, I switched to Dvorak. This was, for me, a very poor decision. As you've noticed, Dvorak overloads the right pinky finger, which is a bad idea on a typewriter, but a horrible idea on a computer keyboard where other often-used keys are on the right edge of the layout.
Moving the entire arm to hit Enter and other right-edge keys with a non-pinky finger helped some, but not enough. After a couple weeks of increasing right-pinky pain, I simply swapped the L and P keys, so the commonly-used L was on the left index instead of the right pinky.
The L/P swap helped with the overloading, but exacerbated my second problem with a new layout, which was greater tension while typing. Even though I felt comfortable with Dvorak on a conscious level, I was still sometimes tensing up before keystrokes as my fingers weren't sure which way to go for an extra few milliseconds. And I was still having to use QWERTY keyboards often enough that I couldn't completely banish that muscle memory. Eventually I just switched back to QWERTY. More finger-mileage, yes, but is finger-mileage really the issue? It wasn't for me.
Third: No, really. Spend your time on the annoying difficult-to-scientifically-analyze meatspace issues like posture, not on keyboard layouts.
Don't sell yourself short! You already know where all the keys are, so learning to touch type won't take you long at all. Just rest your fingers on home row (index fingers on the "F" and "J" keys with the notches, thumbs on the spacebar.) Strike each key with the nearest finger, and return the hand to home row afterwards. Ta da! You're a typist. I'd be surprised if it took you longer than an afternoon to get back to your old speed, and you'll keep getting faster as you continue to type.
And don't say it's "irrelevant"--that's like some naughts gentleman wondering why anyone would pay for broadband when his AOL always worked just fine. Just change where you rest your hands, and you'll get a free broadband upgrade.
DATABASE WOW WOW
its not that useless in programming