FrogPad--2 days

[marcmagus]

I'm getting more comfortable with the FrogPad--I know the key positions for all the letter and number keys, and most of the punctuation. The latter I trust much less, however. Trust is a big issue at this stage--I know things but often feel compelled to look to confirm anyway, which slows me down. Also, I tend to hesitate at the beginning of a word until I think I know how to type the whole thing, which is weird.

So I'm pretty ok for conversational typing, if a bit s...l...ow. Controlling my computer, otoh, is a pain, and scary. It's just intimidating having to accurately hit all those symbol keys, and they're kind of a pain in the ass to reach. Plus hitting enter by accident is rather easy, and dangerous.

(HTML tags are a particular pain: [Symbol][<][Symbol][p][Symbol][>][Symbol] enters "<p>". No chording there, for good or ill, it's 7 keypresses. Apparently the next version, or the current USB-only version (I went with Bluetooth-only) will have a non-sticky way to use [Symbol] so that becomes only 5 keypresses, which would be a huge improvement.)

I do find myself occasionally reaching for some keys in their qwerty positions, but surprisingly infrequently--I think it mostly happens after a p (same location) when I try to go somewhere I commonly go after p.

I find myself running into "thzspaczproblem" a fair amount, though less often this post than usually; perhaps I'm smoothing things out, but probably I'm just typing slower when thinking what to say. (I'll explain what it is in a separate post, later.)

Flow on this keyboard is really interesting--I really do often find my hand conveniently located to the next key I want to press, it's pretty rare to chord twice in a row writing English, and the like. In other words, I think they did a darn good job on designing the layout of the letters and numbers. I'm less convinced about the symbols, but they were probably targetting written English again, not bash and vi.

Edit: I lied...> is typed with the [Space]-[<] chord.

Comments

[tadhgka.livejournal.com]

It's awesome to hear that the FrogPad is working out for you, post-surgery, though it does indeed sound very annoying for symbol-entry.

I've occasionally toyed with the idea of learning a more efficient keyboard (presumably DVORAK), but have been put off by the spectre of Massively Reduced Efficiency. I have no positive memories of formally learning to type (Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, memorably, actually made me cry), and my current fair (though not excellent) speed when typing on a QWERTY keyboard is mostly the result of typing recreationally for a Very Long Time. The idea of starting over from scratch has always seemed daunting, so it's nice to hear that the time to competency might not be that long after all.

p.s. whenever you're back in town (next week?) you should get in touch with M. and me, and we'll have you over for dinner. I'd suggest a date now, but I don't know what your plans are currently.

[marcmagus]

Yeah, I keep thinking about learning Dvorak (or maybe Colamak), but put it off because I don't want to deal with the slowness, even knowing that in the long run I'll get more efficiency from the alternate layout.

After a couple days I'm typing slowly enough it's really annoying, but enough I can deal with it...this gives me hope for maybe totally confusing myself by attempting to learn a new layout once I have both hands again...

I'm hoping to come back tomorrow; I'll let you two know when I'm back.

[oldsilenus.livejournal.com]

"[T]hzspaczproblem" sounds to me like a really good title for a science fiction short story.