I

Typing

Since 12022 HE

My typing journey journal. Read bottom to top for chronological order.

Monkeytype: gqd

Keyboard: voyager

bucketlist:

Chording

December ‘24

I did create a few simple chords, want to see how they feel.

The idea is to turn the keys pressed in any “order” into the correct order.

inout
t+h+ethe
e+t+hthe

Since they are pressed simultaneously there is no real order in that sense. It’s more like those keys in combination produce that.

Typing time goes down from N key presses to a single combined key press, speed should go up by the same factor.

inout
t+h+athat
w+i+lwill

The ones I like the most are those that require less keys than I would have to type when pressed sequentially:

Voyager

September ‘24

I’m very happy with my ZSA Voyger. It has a very robust, high quality feel, great software. The layout editing + flashing experience is very streamlined.

Plus ZSA is awesome. They are a small team and you can just talk to them.

Layout

Mounting

November ‘24

Mounted my voyager with c-clamps on my office desk into a vertical upright position.

Can say, keeping my hands in their natural position without being forced to rotate them just feels so much better.

Tilting

September ‘24

Before I got my voyager, the thing I was worried about the most, was the absence of built-in curvature. It’s just flat. And I really liked the extreme curve in the Advantage.

So I got myself 2 things:

  1. A set of 3d printed keycaps with higher profile for the upper and lower and outer rows, and low profile for the home/inner rows.
    bought here
  2. A tiling set that adds 3d printed spacers between switches and keycaps and changes their height and angle.
    bought here

Both sound great on paper, but practically both turned out to be worse than without.

The keycaps were nice, but I could literally feel the printed lines on the keys, which just felt sorta low quality and rough. Almost like comparing copy print paper to photo print paper. The keycaps the voyager ships with just felt way better - very clean, robust and high quality.

As for the tilting set, since the switches itself were not tilted but rather there is a spacer that is put on top of the switch that the keycap is then inserted into, key-pressing sometimes blocked. While typing you sometimes hit the key not perfectly straight but just enough to press it down, but the longer arms from keycap to switch caused the inner mechanical arm of the switch to block when pressed down. Can’t recommend.

After typing on the voyager for some time, I don’t actually miss the absence of curvature, sure it would be nice to have, but it’s not like I feel I’m missing it.

Lily

I somehow managed to get pineapple coconut juice right on my advantage. It survived, but 3 keys just got pretty clunky. Surprisingly it got better with higher room temperature and worse when it was a bit colder. Later I figured out that this was likely because of the sugar crystals in the juice changing their structure based on temperature. Anyway, I just ordered a new set of Cherry MX Tacticle Brown replacement keys, March ‘24. July, I finally took action, got myself a soldering iron and took the keyboard apart to desolder the bad keys and solder new ones in. That was really fun, working on the keyboard and fixing it, getting it back up and fully feeling the unstuck keys again.

Since I needed to replace my advantage for travel reasons, I was looking for something columnar + split + hot-swap.

August ‘24

Based on my earlier fun fixing experience I somehow thought it would probably also be fun to build my own keyboard. So I ordered a Lily58 Pro Kit.

Well, there is definitely a lot more to it to solder a whole keyboard than just fixing 3 keys, that I can say. Tbh, it wasn’t that much fun. I wasn’t really feeling the whole DIY vibe. By this time I just wanted a working hot-swap keyboard and don’t worry about potentially destroying PCB circuits with my excellent soldering skills.

In the end I was only able to connect one half of the keyboard for flashing, my guess is that I broke the other one because of dismounting the TSR cable while the keyboard was still on power. And even that ‘working’ half had a dead key, due to me fucking up the underlying PCB during soldering.

At this point I was craving something that just works.

Next: voyager

Advantage 360

November ‘23

Inspired by the one and only Primeagen my first mechanical keyboard was the Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro.

It’s a great keyboard, columnar, split, wonderfully curved, loud and heavy as hell.

Cherry MX Tactile Brown switches, 45g activation force.

I was hesitate at first, adaption was harder than I thought, mostly because of the switch to columnar layout.

So it wasn’t until January ‘24, when I forced myself to make it my day-to-day keyboard, that I started typing on it full-time.

Sometime afterwards I actually had a hard time typing on my macbook keyboard, because of the stacked layout. So I got myself a backpack to carry the advantage. Well it’s definitely not very travel-friendly, given how bulky and heavy it is. And it’s a shame there is no real travel-case for it. Anyway, at some point I got used to both typing on columnar and then also switching back to stacked on my macbook when I had to.

Because it’s not very travel friendly keyboard, and I was about to move around for a bit, I sold it in August ‘24.

Next: lily

ZMK

My config repo

Since I am typing on German layout - at least as far as macOS is concerned, I had to reverse engineer some of the mappings from US to DE, to use the US keys as proxies for the actual DE keys I wanted to remap (unnecessary confusion).

Take-aways

On the keyboard:

On the Switches:

CharaChorder

When I heard about the CharaChorder I was immediately excited about both, the chording and the joystick aspects, both very promising in terms of typing speed.

In April ‘23 I ordered a CharaChorder One and got it imported from the US to Germany in May.

I started to learn the CharaChorder 2 times and lost interest 2 times. I was able to type all basic characters, but adaption for everyday use was just to hard (aka I didn’t want it bad enough). Rolling the joystick for series of keys on the same joystick was fun, tho. I eventually ended up selling it a year later, May ‘24.

Touch Typing

May ‘22

I started learning touch typing with TypingClub.

Rewiring muscle memory the most challenging at the initial learning phase. And it took me months to feel comfortable. Adaption to optimized key remappings later did become a lot easier over time.

Keyboard: Logitech MX Keys for Mac

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