On a whim, I decided that I wanted to give ergonomic keyboards a try. I spared myself the pain of doing hours of research into them and stressing out about choosing between a few options that are probably mostly the same, and just bought the Moonlander keyboard on a recommendation from a co-worker.

March 31, 2023

I’ve never typed on anything other than a standard QWERTY keyboard, so I’m anticipating that it’s going to take a long time before I’m even close to getting back to my usual words-per-minute on this new keyboard. And with that in mind, my plan here is to document both the progression of my WPM on the new keyboard using monkeytype.com, and the changes I make to the keyboard layout over time. Now I’m off to take the WPM test using my current keyboard.

That seems about right; I’m a pretty fast typer, but am definitely prone to some mistakes, especially if I intentionally try to speed up.

Before I take the test with the Moonlander, let’s take a look at its default layout.

🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴. Okay, well some of it is actually more familiar than I was expecting, namely the SHIFT keys which are still more or less where I’d expect them to be. But there’s definitely a lot to get used to here.

• The letter keys are all lined up in columns, instead of being staggered
• BACKSPACE is where CAPS LOCK usually is
• The CTRL keys share their key with another character, Z for left CTRL and / for right CTRL. A notable consequence for me, in addition to them being in slightly different positions, is that doing CTRL+Z with right CTRL now seems impossible, which is normally what I’d use.
• SPACE is now only hittable by my right thumb, but I’m used to using my left thumb.
• ESC is now supposed to be hit using your right index finger.
• ENTER is now supposed to be hit using your right thumb.
• A lot of symbols that I use frequently aren’t on this main layer, like the curly brackets.

I’m just going to go ahead and take the test again with this default layout, just to see where my base WPM is at before I start messing with the layout.

Oof. I wasn’t expecting to do well, but that’s a little lower than I was thinking. The first thing I noticed having issues with is the letter c. c is usually below my left index finger, but is now right under my left middle finger. Luckily, that seemed to be the only letter I was having major issues with. Aside from that, the new BACKSPACE key placement wasn’t too bad getting used to, but it takes a second each time to remember where I’m supposed to hit.

Side note: I realize that this test that I’m taking isn’t exhaustive for my typing abilities since it doesn’t contain numbers, symbols, or new-lines. I’m just going to focus on letters for now, and move onto other types of tests later.

First layout changes

My first instict here is to just re-map all of the keys to the spots that I’m used to them being, but I think I want to resist that urge for now. I’m certain that extensive thought was put into this default layout, and while, for example, the ESC key being in that right-side thumb cluster area seems strange to me, it may have been placed there for a very good reason. I want to give some of these new ideas a chance, so I’m going to try and minimize the number of layout changes I make right away.

I only made a few changes, I believe 0 of which will have any effect on my letters typing speed. I moved the CMD/WIN key to what was the right arrow key by default, and put left CTRL to the position where it would be on a standard keyboard. I also re-mapped the layer-switching keys to be on the thumb cluster, because I was finding it impossible to remember where they were. I’m only showing layers 0 and 2 here because I’m not using layer 1 at all yet, while I’m now using layer 2 for the arrow keys.

April 1, 2023

I didn’t use my computer a whole lot today, but I do seem to be making some improvement.

I took about 10 of these just now and this was the best one, but they were all mostly in the 35-55 WPM range. The mistakes I’m making most often are:

• Hitting v instead of c
• Hitting b instead of v
• Hitting CMD/WIN instead of SPACE
• Trying to hit y with my left hand
• Forgetting which side of the keyboard b is on

I’m really trying to give the SPACE placement a chance, but I am becomming tempted to move CMD/WIN to the left and put SPACE in its place. For now, I’m sticking with it on the thumb cluster.

CS:GO

The only substantial changes I’ve made to the layout today were to accomodate playing CS:GO.

On a new layer, I mapped SPACE, which is JUMP in CS:GO, to the key that I keep trying to use for it, and mapped 1,2,3,4, the keys for switching weapons, to the thumb cluster because I was having trouble hitting those keys consistently. I still haven’t trained my brain to use the thumb cluster instead of the number keys, but I do think it’ll be better once I’m used to it.

I think the only major change I’ve made to the main layer is moving the layer switch keys to the bottom-right side of the keyboard, which I did because I added that new row for CS:GO and wanted to keep the layer switch keys in some easily rememberable, contiguous spots.

April 8, 2023

Alright, it’s been a full week of only using this keyboard. Since my last update, I havent’t made any changes to my layout that would affect typing English words. Here’s my latest monkeytype.com test

I’m pretty happy with that, and I can feel myself getting better. It almost feels natural to hit c with my middle finger now, and I’m hitting SPACE correctly most of the time. However, as I am typing this, I initially input the “y” in “correctly” as ”]” because I’m used to having to stretch my index finger two keys over to get to “y”. I’m using my right hand for it now, which is correct, but the muscle memory of having to stretch my finger over an extra key seems to have transferred to the new hand. And overall, I’m still just really clunky when typing. Hitting each individual key on its own is becoming easy, but actually typing fast is not. I’m improving, but it still feels like getting back to 100+ WPM will take months, not weeks or days.

An unfortunate, but probably expected, side-effect of a week of using this keyboard is that my typing speed on my laptop keyboard and phone keyboard has taken a major hit. I haven’t done any tests on them yet, but I’m definitely making way more mistakes than I used to, the biggest one being hitting a or CAPSLOCK instead of BACKSPACE since I’m now used to BACKSPACE being on the left side of the keyboard. And I’m not sure how to describe this, but the “clunkiness” of typing on the new keyboard has also transferred to the regular keyboard, maybe to a lesser degree though.

May 4, 2023

A little over a month now, let’s see where I’m at:

Well, not much of an improvement over last time, and it does feel that way while typing. I am at the point where I don’t feel like my productivity is being negatively affected by the keyboard, which is honestly what is most important to me. Hopefully I’ll get back to looking super cool with my 100+ WPM at some point, but for now I’m happy with just being able to keep my same level of productivity as on a regular keyboard.

The only significant change I’ve made to my layout since my last update is the arrow keys. I mapped the arrow keys to hjkl, which corresponds with left-down-up-right movement in Vim, and this feels way more natural than in the upside-down T layout they were previously in. Now, I can just hit the Layer-2 key that my right thumb naturally sits on, and hjkl turn into arrow keys. I imagine this layout wouldn’t be very easy to use in some cases, like playing a web game, but I’ll cross that bridge if it ever comes.

October 20, 2023

Oh hey there, I bet you thought I had forgotten about this post. Well, I did, but now I have remembered and will post an update. It’s been about 8 months now of using this keyboard for multiple hours just about every day, so I’m very curious to see how close I’ve gotten to my baseline of 114 WPM at 95% accuracy.

This is about what I had expected; I definitely still notice an improvement in my typing performance whenever I switch over to my laptop’s keyboard. That said, I’m not really sure how to explain the difference. On April 1, I cited these 5 issues as the ones causing most of my mistakes

Hitting v instead of c
Hitting b instead of v
Hitting CMD/WIN instead of SPACE
Trying to hit y with my left hand
Forgetting which side of the keyboard b is on

and I can say pretty confidently that none of these are still a major issue. If I had to guess, I’d say that my biggest problem now is the somewhat uncomfortable default position that my left thumb is in, being at about a 90 degree angle to ensure I can hit the SPACE key without hitting any of the other thumb cluster keys. This position is a little uncomfortable, so that’s no fun, but I also think it might be restricting the movement of the rest of my left hand just a bit.

Maybe I’ll experiment with moving SPACE to the big orange/red button on the thumb cluster, since that would let me extend my thumb and hopefully relieve some of the discomfort.