I bought a thinkpad keyboard with the red joystick thing when I hurt my shoulder - it was only supposed to be temporary but I find myself rarely using my mouse. I’m not a great fan of the keys (especially compared to Mac keyboard).
Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
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Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#22I bought a thinkpad keyboard with the red joystick thing when I hurt my shoulder - it was only supposed to be temporary but I find myself rarely using my mouse. I’m not a great fan of the keys (especially compared to Mac keyboard).
those keyboards are great for servers or headless workstations. i have one on my thinkstation for the occasional moments where i need non-networked access. i have the usb version but they also make a wireless one.
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#23I bought a thinkpad keyboard with the red joystick thing when I hurt my shoulder - it was only supposed to be temporary but I find myself rarely using my mouse. I’m not a great fan of the keys (especially compared to Mac keyboard).
Yes, "joystick thing"... https://xkcd.com/243/
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#24wow, that keyboard looks painful. Really, why would you use a hard wooden wrist rest? what a mess. I had trouble with my palms years ago, and a soft wrist rest was the solution. Your palms don't have high pressure points, the weight is spread out. This means the system of strings and pulleys from your muscles in your arms that control your fingers can function well, and long-term. The skin slides across soft material…
I am using similar setup, without the touch module. I will never return to my usual TKL keyboard considering the comfort that I get using the UHK. I am hoping at some point the Naya keyboard is released so I can have a good trackball available as well.
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#25wow, that keyboard looks painful. Really, why would you use a hard wooden wrist rest? what a mess. I had trouble with my palms years ago, and a soft wrist rest was the solution. Your palms don't have high pressure points, the weight is spread out. This means the system of strings and pulleys from your muscles in your arms that control your fingers can function well, and long-term. The skin slides across soft material…
i think i'm going to trust the person who uses the rest to determine what's comfortable for them.
many people don't have a problem with the material hardness of the rest, they just need elevation. also fabric can get disgusting after a while.
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#26wow, that keyboard looks painful. Really, why would you use a hard wooden wrist rest? what a mess. I had trouble with my palms years ago, and a soft wrist rest was the solution. Your palms don't have high pressure points, the weight is spread out. This means the system of strings and pulleys from your muscles in your arms that control your fingers can function well, and long-term. The skin slides across soft material…
I was really surprised at how much more comfortable my wooden wrist rest is. As another user pointed out, getting the elevation all I needed. Definitely one of my favorite upgrades to my setup (and definitely easier to keep clean).
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#27Ignoring the health concerns, which can be addressed with a vertical mouse, I don't think mice are necessarily slow. When navigating interfaces that are optimized for visual search, translating the area that I'm looking at into a series of keys requires more cognitive effort than just clicking it. When visually scanning, my I subconsciously move my cursor to the area that I'm looking at.
Whether you want to use a mouse or a keyboard depends on the task you want to perform and its temporal proximity to other tasks. For example, when reading code, you tend to use a mouse wheel and visually scan and select references. A mouse would likely be faster. When typing, however, your hands are already on the keyboard, so VimMotion is faster. Finally, I love hybrid operations such as initiating a screenshot using the keyboard and selecting the region with the mouse.
Whether interfaces should be designed for keyboards or mice also depends on factors such as discoverability, frequency of use, and the amount of available operations. Command palettes are amazing, but they are less discoverable and restricted in their layout. Interestingly, Raycast, the discoverable keyboard-centric app, has a mouse-centric settings interface.
Of course, most of us already intuitively know this, but it's tempting to drink the keyboard cool-aid. I had a phase where I aggressively prioritized the keyboard and was frustrated by MacOS's lackluster support for it. My biggest annoyance with the mouse was the distance my hands had to travel when switching from the keyboard. Removing the numpad helped with this.
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#28Ignoring the health concerns, which can be addressed with a vertical mouse, I don't think mice are necessarily slow. When navigating interfaces that are optimized for visual search, translating the area that I'm looking at into a series of keys requires more cognitive effort than just clicking it. When visually scanning, my I subconsciously move my cursor to the area that I'm looking at. Whether you want to use a mou…
The mouse that I ditched in favor of this setup was a vertical mouse, I definitely agree that is better than your standard variety.
The mouse key layer includes scrolling keys, and I do actually have a scroll wheel on the left module which I use a decent bit while reading. Best of both worlds IMO.
Of course, to each their own!
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#29I want to experiment with a tablet and pen to replace the mouse. My arm hurts too much with the mouse currently. Anyone have experience with that?
Re: Exterminate your desk: How to remove your mouse
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
My previously favorite keyboard, Das Keyboard, has a rotary encoder for the volume control, and it's fantastic. I agree that sliders and encoders could/should be used more. There are plenty of great MIDI devices out there that offer them, I should play around with some of them for day to day stuff like this rather than just music.
Same. The devices to test this are very cheap over at Aliexpress, or maybe Keebmonkey offerings if you want something a little better https://www.keebmonkey.com/products/megalodon-triple-knob-ma... I wonder if I would get used to using a single key for each app versus Alt-tabbing. I believe this is the main cause of my left wrist pain.
> I wonder if I would get used to using a single key for each app versus Alt-tabbing. I believe this is the main cause of my left wrist pain.
I use that kind of setup (kinda) in i3, it is great. It's not one app per key, but one keybind per virtual desktop but I have i3 set up that apps autostart and gets placed always on same desktop
So going to IDE is always caps+4 (I rebounded caps to act as modifier), mail client is caps+F2 etc.
Then few keybinds to move stuff around for those 2% of cases where I need apps on different desktops than usual.