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Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

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Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#1

Post by Townley »

A relative of mine recently suffered a serious injury to their dominant (right) arm, which will have a long recovery period (likely several months). Ideally finger movement will be restored sooner, but even if so it might not be comfortable to keep the injured arm in an ergonomic typing position.

So I wanted to prepare some options for one-handed typing that they can review. At first glance, it looks like solutions fall into one of three categories:

- Trainings on how to effectively use a keyboard with one hand

- Keyboard remappings on existing hardware to use alternative key layouts that favor the keys on the left side

- Specialty keyboards that are intended to be used with one hand. Some of these seem promising but also shockingly expensive.

Any thoughts on what solutions you've seen work / you might pursue in a similar situation?

Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#2

Post by janice1999 »

Have you considered voice dictation and control? There are good commercial solutions and even some free ones (like https://talonvoice.com/ - edit: not open source but has lots of community plugins). I used it for a while when I was recovering from hand problems. I was surprised how easy it was to learn. It helped a lot for tasks like navigating windows, writing emails etc. There are even voice coding applications now (https://www.cursorless.org/).

Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#4

Post by torben-friis »

Any specifics on the kind of typing they need?

If it’s human text (as opposed to code), one handed swipe style typing on a smartphone can get really fluid, and it’s relatively easy to get for someone who is a touch typer. I’d check on ways to use that as computer input if needed.

Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#6

Post by lburton »

This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmware keyboard (I was also already typing on a split keyboard so that might be part of the reason it was fairly easy to adjust). See https://docs.qmk.fm/features/swap_hands#swap-hands-action

Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#8

Post by bryanlarsen »

lburton wrote: post #6

This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmwar…

Yes, I was just going to make this suggestion. If it's a temporary problem, you probably don't want a solution that requires extensive retraining to use. A mirrored keyboard takes advantage of existing brain wiring.

autohotkey layout: https://github.com/hanmindev/mirrorboard

xkb layout: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

#9

Post by colgandev »

First of all, condolences to your friend and cool of you to look into this.

Back in the day I switched to Dvorak and came across the "one handed Dvorak layout. This may be what you are referring to. I haven't tried it much but those layouts could be a temporary solution. I found Qwerty to be a lot easier to type one handed straight up because Dvorak tries to alternate hands between keys.

I recently discovered Talon, an open source app for voice control of basically everything on a machine that requires no typing at all. I saw some people are using it even if they can use their hands, as a power tool. It appears to be fully Python scriptable and also gives you some nice speech to text abilities too.

It allows you to specify a bunch of keywords for typing symbols and it looks like some people can do full coding quite quickly.

Perhaps this injury could be an opportunity to try something like this and become more powerful than before?

Best of luck and recovery to your friend.

https://talonvoice.com/

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