#Keyboard

When I was young and still had time to play games on a regular basis I got myself an 80% mechanical keyboard from Cooler Master. I didn’t want to waste any space with a useless num-pad. For a very long time, I was very satisfied with the keyboard. It still serves me today. It has cherry brown switches. I got very used to them, but I always wanted to try something different. A few years later I found the r/MechanicalKeyboards subreddit. I was amazed by the collection of custom-made keyboards and the variety of switches and other customization that is available. I decided to make my own split orthodox Redox keyboard with very light switches so I could type fast. At least that’s what I was thinking, but after a few days, I realized that those switches were a mistake. There are so many articles on the internet about how to pick switches, but I guess it’s just finding what is good for each person by experience. At the same time, I’ve switched to the Colemak layout. This one was perhaps the best choice that I could make at that time. My wrists were hurting and the ease of typing words with much less friction really helps out today. The time of struggle was definitely worth it.

So it has been 3 months since I’ve made a full transition to only writing on Colemak keyboard layout. Now that I am in the middle of the adaptation period is time to sum up what was causing the most problems and what went smoothly. Lazy explanation would be that it is something between QWERTY and Dvorak. It keeps the most used shortcuts unchanged and moves the keys that are most frequently used to the middle. At the time of writing this it is the 3rd most used keyboard layout after those 2 mentioned above. To get to know Colemak better I’d visit the official website.

In this blog post, I am going to take you out on a little journey of making my own keyboard. Perhaps help you if you’ve decided to make yourself your own. But first, I want to tell you: I’ve been feeling pain in the wrist of my right hand for 2 years now. I’ve started to feel it when I started to be more physically active. I’ve been working out and played a lot of squash. It got to the point that I had to visit an orthopedist. I was scared that I’d have the infamous carpal tunnel syndrome. At this stage, he said it was just strained. The pain eased out after some therapy but it still comes back and it got to the point that I had to change my work habits. One night I was checking out the state of programming streams on twitch. I’ve found a great streamer JMS WRN and as I was chatting with him about my wrist problem he gave me a recommendation for my new mouse: Logitech MX Vertical and then he showed me that he has a Discord channel just for keyboard stuff. And that was the moment for me. I’ve discovered a whole new world of possibilities around keyboards.