I type in this weird hybrid .. thing. I find it much more comfortable, though more error prone, than traditional home-row on traditional keyboards.
I use nearly all fingers, but where i really suffer is that i find key-combinations, notably alt+ to be really awkward because my hands are at a steep angle relative to the straight keyboard.
I live in Kakoune (vim-like) so "touch typing" is my bread and butter, but home-row just feels so bad to me.
I keep meaning to try a split keyboard with home-row. I suspect that's the root of my issue, and that my odd typing pattern is a result of trying to manually replicate a split keyboard. /shrug
I can recommend a small split ortholinear keyboard. I built one as a weekend project and it was pretty fun, doable with basic microcontroller and solder skills (except for the ~50 SMD LEDs which I couldn’t be bothered to do). Pretty happy with it, it’s comfortable and I do feel that I type better than on a regular keyboard. You can buy kits containing everything you need, I got this one:
With small keyboards, you’re trading off physical distance between keys for having to press more buttons simultaneously. Might fix your problems with reaching key combinations, but the combinations themselves do become more complicated as well.
I've wanted to pursue them but my hope was to find software to do stateful/modal transitions. As a fake example, instead of pressing Alt+Z you'd press Alt then Z. It becomes a lot like modal editors, which is my favorite style of editing - i add a lot of usermode stuff into Kakoune to avoid key combinations.
So far i've not felt i could get software to do the modal editing i speak of reliably in all of my environments. I'm on NixOS right now, and i didn't want to manage the software. It definitely is interesting though!
I use nearly all fingers, but where i really suffer is that i find key-combinations, notably alt+ to be really awkward because my hands are at a steep angle relative to the straight keyboard.
I live in Kakoune (vim-like) so "touch typing" is my bread and butter, but home-row just feels so bad to me.
I keep meaning to try a split keyboard with home-row. I suspect that's the root of my issue, and that my odd typing pattern is a result of trying to manually replicate a split keyboard. /shrug