3 ms·

I had a major bike accident, shoulder dislocation that took weeks to recover and broken pinky. I couldn’t type with my left hand, but I couldn’t afford not to

I had a major bike accident, shoulder dislocation that took weeks to recover and broken pinky. I couldn’t type with my left hand, but I couldn’t afford not to work. I looked into one-handed keyboards, found a variety of half-keyboards that mirrored the other half while holding the spacebar. These are patented, and I also couldn’t afford them. Being patented, I was also unable to find software offering the same. So I learned enough Objective C to build it for myself. It was a hacky, crashy mess but I never intended it to be production quality… so I also built a monitoring app to relaunch it when it crashed. It wasn’t anything special but it got me through that recovery!

sturza 5y ago
why was Objective C the solution for the tool you built? can you explain more what the product/output is and how you use it?
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Objective C because that was the most viable option for native Mac development at the time, and I needed access to keyboard events system wide for it to be useful. What it did was listen for keydown/up events on the spacebar, and swap the system keyboard layout to a horizontally reversed qwerty layout while the spacebar was held for some (arbitrary based on what felt right to me) duration. When released it would restore the normal qwerty layout. This made it relatively cognitively easy to treat my right hand as a reversed “left” hand and use my touch typing muscle memory while I was unable to type with my actual left hand. If I remember correctly, I took a typing speed test and it was ~70% my normal two handed touch typing speed, which was good enough to keep working while I recovered.
ptaken 5y ago
There's also qmk's swap hands feature [1]. Qmk doesn't run on any hardware but if it does the possibilities are pretty much endless. Glad you made it through though and don't need it any more :) [1] https://beta.docs.qmk.fm/using-qmk/software-features/feature_swap_hands https://beta.docs.qmk.fm/using-qmk/software-features/feature...
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  It’s cool to see this in software now! My little hack was useful enough for me but I didn’t bother taking it any further because I didn’t want to fuss with patents.

sturza 5y ago

why was Objective C the solution for the tool you built? can you explain more what the product/output is and how you use it?

eyelidlessness 5y ago
Objective C because that was the most viable option for native Mac development at the time, and I needed access to keyboard events system wide for it to be useful. What it did was listen for keydown/up events on the spacebar, and swap the system keyboard layout to a horizontally reversed qwerty layout while the spacebar was held for some (arbitrary based on what felt right to me) duration. When released it would restore the normal qwerty layout. This made it relatively cognitively easy to treat my right hand as a reversed “left” hand and use my touch typing muscle memory while I was unable to type with my actual left hand. If I remember correctly, I took a typing speed test and it was ~70% my normal two handed touch typing speed, which was good enough to keep working while I recovered.

ptaken 5y ago

There's also qmk's swap hands feature [1]. Qmk doesn't run on any hardware but if it does the possibilities are pretty much endless. Glad you made it through though and don't need it any more :) [1] https://beta.docs.qmk.fm/using-qmk/software-features/feature_swap_hands https://beta.docs.qmk.fm/using-qmk/software-features/feature...

eyelidlessness 5y ago
It’s cool to see this in software now! My little hack was useful enough for me but I didn’t bother taking it any further because I didn’t want to fuss with patents.