Hey folks, me again.
Those of you who went from a larger keyboard to a smaller one that required the use of layers: was the transition hard? Could you still type on the old keyboard after?
Context: I was asking the other day about which ortholinear to get for commuting. Although the glove80 is the closest to my current home desktop keyboard, I’ve ruled it out as I don’t think it will fit in my backpack. If it does, it will take up too much space.
So I’m looking at something like the voyager, but with such a small keyboard, there will be a learning curve. I’m used to ortholinear, but I’ve never used layers. And if I manage to adapt, it’d be nice to still be able to use my desktop keywell keyboard at home.
Thoughts?
Wait, you’re supposed to adapt? I just fumble my way through the day.
Mine isn’t even that reduced and after 4 years I still miss instant, layerless access to the F keys.
My strategy was to make a mental note of where my fingers expected the key to be and then map them to a layer later. That was I wasn’t working against already engrained muscle memory. It helps to have layer themes too. I have alpha, numbers, and coding symbols.
It took me a few weeks to really get to muscle memory, but after that I disliked full-size keyboards enough that I started using kmonad on my laptop with the traditional keyboard. I eventually ended up with kanata (which has a superior chord handling) everywhere, until I got a piantor 50%, when I switched to QMK.
I switched by degrees, though; I’d used a more limited set of layers for a couple of years before going full gonzo, so I was used to the modality; adding more layers was less a new paradigm and more just adding complexity to what I was, by then, familiar with. So I can’t say I’m a fair measure.
QMK has been a struggle to get all of the settings working such that there isn’t some behavior that is annoying, and I’m still not there, but having the programming in the keyboard has made some situations easier (consoles, etc).
I’m 9 mos into the piantor, and I still struggle with remembering where I bound some infrequently used layers, like the layer I put all the F-keys. And rarely I’ll think about how to get a key - rather than relying on muscle memory - and simply fail to remember the magic combo. However, I won’t voluntarily go back. Having numbers and special characters accessible without having to change my hand positions is simply invaluable, and I still use kanata on my laptop to get the same behavior, despite it meaning I have a whole row of keys I’m not using anymore.
The biggest hassle in going back to a full size is the reduced number of thumb keys. And I admit, I learned to touch type being able to hit the space bar with either thumb, and simply do not have the luxury of enough keys to dedicated to duplicate functions to allow this. This would be probably my biggest complaint, and only regret about switching.
I kept a standard layout keyboard handy for about a week, it took me probably 3 weeks to transition fully. I fall immediately back into bad habits of typing on both sides of the keyboard on standard QWERTY keyboards without the ortholinear split layout, sometimes I even try to reach across the split after a day or two and hit T or Y with my index finger from the wrong hand.
