Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Friday, February 18, 2005

Poor Man's Kinesis Keyboard

I've been finding recently that after a day of keyboarding, I sometimes get a sharp pain in my left wrist, especially when I try to rotate my hand counterclockwise. The most probable cause is that many software programs make frequent use of the Ctrl key (perhaps most notorious is the Emacs text editor -- there's even something called "Emacs Pinky Syndrome").

I didn't want to drop $600 on one of those luxurious Kinesis keyboards, and I didn't want to make my wrist worse, so in true Make Magazine spirit, I moved the keys around. There's a great free Windows utility called KeyTweak that lets me do this.

Before:
Before

After:
After

Now the Shift and Ctrl keys are nice and high, alleviating the unnatural twisting you'd normally need to do to do a Ctrl+A, for instance.

Update: To speed up the re-learning process, I have put some velcro on the Ctrl key to make it feel different.

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