Ergodox - one week in

(continued from earlier)

I've been typing on my Ergodox keyboard for about a week now. First off, though, the keycaps haven't come in, so I've had to make due with a standard set from a normal keyboard. This means that the keys are raisesd (the Ergodox was designed for flat keys) but also means that the nonstandard-sized keys are just arranged on there randomly.

Observe:

Mappings

I've been adjusting and tweaking the key mappings as much as I can, and adding a surprising number of application-specific mappings in there as well.

For instance, I find it much easier to just know that I have special arrow-keys that move the cursor left and right in the terminal or the Ipython QTconsole rather than trying to remember the keybindings on these programs.

I've also tried to use keycaps that roughly correspond to my layer 0 mappings, and I suspect I'll need or want a visual reminder for quite some time.

Overall impressions

I have to say, I'm not sure if it's the psychology behind it or what, but the Cherry MX switches actually feel really really nice to type with. Also, because the muscles required are slightly different than they are when using a laptop, there's this feel of slightly new fine motor awareness developing in my hand.

The thumb buttons, the biggest reason I wanted to switch over, do take a while to get adjusted to. Particularly, the two thumb buttons at the very top are hard to reach without moving your hand significantly.

In general, I'm liking it, but like I said, I'm still tweaking the layout and playing with different possible functions.