7 ms·
One Handed Keyboard
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago"Hi, would you like some RSI?" "Yes, just the one thank you."
- hsbauauvhabzb 11mo agoIirc this keyboard was custom made for a user that only has one hand. A layered design would be better but harder for the average user to adapt to.
- block_dagger 11mo agoThis already happened to me because of mouse usage. I’ve longed for a keyboard like this so I cam rest my right arm/hand which has significant damage and pain.
- rnentjes 11mo agoI am using this mouse because of that, and it works for me: https://www.contourdesign.com/collection/contour-slidermouse https://www.contourdesign.com/collection/contour-slidermouse
- mechanicum 11mo agoTheir video on YouTube, in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vW12gQ4Klc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vW12gQ4Klc
- dandersch 11mo agoI wonder what issues they ran into with using the entire keyboard as a mouse.
- psKama 11mo agoSame, looks like an amazing idea.
- hiq 11mo agoI'm assuming it's too heavy and has too much contact surface (so more friction), making it too hard to glide smoothly. There's probably something with the position of the hand when you move the mouse as well. At least I seem to be moving mostly the wrist when I use my mouse, meaning that my hand and forearm are not always aligned; without this alignment, I feel there's more strain on the wrist when typing.
- fragmede 11mo agomy imagined device has the hand a bit more vertical, which would give more leverage for moving the device around. Could you do a thing with magnets where you have a special mousepad as well with the pad being all one pole pointing up and the device the same pole pointing down? Also my imagined device would not need the full keyboard, just the full right side of a qwerty keyboard.
- msephton 11mo agoI'd also guess fatigue. Pushing around that huge thing constantly
- egypturnash 11mo agoPut keyboard in perfect ergonomic position on the desk, move mouse, now the keyboard's in a terrible ergonomic position. Also you have to keep a much bigger area clear for it.
- jolmg 11mo agoI imagine it's uncomfortable to grip since you need to be careful to not press a key doing so. Since you can't rely on fingers much for grip, you could put more force pressing downward with your wrist but that would also add friction with the table. Mice are small enough that you can fit your hand around it, but a keyboard is large and flat.
- deleted 11mo ago
- zero0529 11mo agoOkay I must say, the production quality of that video is insane.
- mholm 11mo agoFeels like HTX blew up out of nowhere with a ton of long form content at once, but they were huge in Chinese social media already, and finally decided to start translating previous content to english and uploading to Youtube.
- utopcell 11mo agoI'd watch a video about the making of this video.
- danielfalbo 11mo ago
- r0b05 11mo agoDoes anyone know which keys/switches out there sound like this one? It's got a soft cheery non-intrusive sound that I really like compared to the usual louder mechanical keys/switches that I hear in videos.
- rjzzleep 11mo agoI recently learned that it's not just the switch, but also the gasket, so the switch plate material, the foam layers and even the keycap itself. I built two different split keyboards recently with the same simple Kailh box red v2 switch and they sound and feel completely different just because of the thickness of the switch plate and the type of keycaps I use.(check this for example https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HIldaxljpzc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HIldaxljpzc ) You can check if you find the switches colors here(it looks like an Akko purple pro, but not quite) https://keeb-finder.com/switches https://keeb-finder.com/switches Whereas rtings has a filtering list that also has sound profiles in the review pages. https://www.rtings.com/keyboard-switch/tools/compare https://www.rtings.com/keyboard-switch/tools/compare
- r0b05 11mo agoThanks for the info. A split keyboard sounds awesome.
- rjzzleep 11mo agoYou can get really cheap boards on taobao, for sofle, lily58, corne(all 3 are open source/open hardware) keyboards. You can of course also get prebuilt ones with or without switches for cheap if you want to. But in today's world, if you have tools and access to a 3d printer you can get a board for a few bucks some components and finish the whole thing with good switches and keycaps for 20-30 dollars. It's a fun experience, and a nice reason to play around with SMD soldering techniques. I had my daughter (4 years) solder the hotswap sockets. Worth checking out the miryoku layout, which is optimized for small keyboards, where I recently added sensor bindings for ec11 encoders[1]. [1] https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku_zmk/pull/116 https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku_zmk/pull/116
- eloeffler 11mo agoJust leaving some links here because I had been researching this intensively before a planned shoulder surgery: (Definitely adding this to my list) Frogpad: German language one handed keyboard. Unfortunately discontinued http://frogpad.com/ http://frogpad.com/ Mirrorboard (my favorite): Intruiging mirror solution that builds upon the assumption that it is easier to access muscle memory from the other hand when you've learned it before https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-keyboard-layout-for-the-lazy/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke... Mistel Barocco fully split Keyboard: Can (and unfortunately must) be programmed without software. Right half is the main keyboard. Left side connects to it, works also in standalone mode but is not programmable then. https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/bd20945a731491407807e80d48c5d790 https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/bd20945a731491407807e80d...
- znpy 11mo agoThe frogpad is most likely the best one. So sad to see it’s been discontinued.
- swannodette 11mo agoSome research on this topic http://edgarmatias.com/papers/hci96/ http://edgarmatias.com/papers/hci96/ On OS X you can achieve this with Keyb, Karabiner Elements, etc. It's also easy to do with a programmable keyboard with ZMK/QMK. I've set up my Kinesis 360 Pro this way, being symmetrical means I can access every key easily. Hardware support for sticky keys also helps quite a bit.
- GlumWoodpecker 11mo agoJust being pedantic and off-topic here, but macOS hasn't been called OS X for nearly ten years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#macOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#macOS
- binaryturtle 11mo agoSome of us still use OS X and haven't made the unnecessary switch to any of the macOS that followed it. :)
- keyle 11mo agoI'm trying to understand why this isn't a thing already. It seems there would be a market for it; when you consider all the different keyboards shapes and sizes...
- victorbjorklund 11mo agoYou can just buy a split keyboard and put all the keys on layers on one side.
- Symbiote 11mo agoA UK company had produced them for decades, which probably serves most injured non-geek users. https://www.maltron.com/store/p19/Maltron_Single_Hand_Keyboards_-_US_English.html https://www.maltron.com/store/p19/Maltron_Single_Hand_Keyboa...
- ginko 11mo agoThat's actually quite a reasonable price for such a specialized device.
- jimlikeslimes 11mo agoCheck out chorded keyboards. They've been a thing for a very long time. At least since early 00s or 90s when I saw them first. They are held one handed have 5 keys and you get different letters by chording multiple keys together.
- clort 11mo agofirst consumer device I ever saw was the Microwriter, back in the 1980's .. but court stenographers have been using chorded keyboards for a century or more - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
- exasperaited 11mo ago
- scatbot 11mo agoFrom the submission title I expected some kind of chorded keyboard. This is just a tiny regular keyboard. What a bummer. This reminds me how I once spend months trying to track down a Frogpad for a cyberpunk-inspired wearable computing project. I found one on eBay but got outbid at the last second. It still hurts a little.
- stavros 11mo agoWouldn't it be easier to make a Frogpad?
- iammrpayments 11mo agoI thought this was a meme for cultured games.
- ginko 11mo agoNotice it's for left-handed use.
- jagged-chisel 11mo agoSomeone linked to the video - they have produced a right-handed version.
- Levitz 11mo agoLeft handed people also have a libido to take care of, after all.
- ok_craig 11mo agoAbout 20 years ago I wrote a little program to turn my own standard keyboard into something I could type on one hand with. It's basically just T9, with every basic letter key bound to two letters instead of one. (The mirror counterpart from the other side of the keyboard.) It's a shit demo from college and I always wanted to share the concept but never made it presentable. https://github.com/cilphex/QuickBoard https://github.com/cilphex/QuickBoard
- attila-lendvai 11mo agoi believe that a crucial feature of good keyboards is that your wrist is stationary. this enables a better form of "muscle memory". i've been using such a keyboard for two decades.
- snickerer 11mo agoMy personal search ended with the ZSA Moonlander.
- othomp 11mo agoMatias has a neat one-handed keyboard. It's quite expensive for what it is, especially considering these days where it's so easy to get a keyboard with remappable keys. There's a simulator on the sidebar at the link, and IMO it's quite intuitive. https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/ https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/
- nephanth 11mo agoI tried that concept whith my ergodox when i had an arm in a splint, but i couldnt quite get my brain to wrap around it. I could type on the right key, but not press the mirror/switch key at the right moment. What would have made it easier is if it could infer the right key like an autocorrect
- hoss1474489 11mo agoWow, 595 USD is insanely expensive for literally half a keyboard.
- icarnales 11mo agothis can be implemented in software, i use it on Windows with AutoHotKey and on mac with Karabiner Elements, it costs 0 Dollars that way and is great
- kurtis_reed 11mo agoIt's in Mandarin
- TheRealNGenius 11mo ago[dead]
- garganzol 11mo agoI am kind of fascinated that some people move the world forward finding a solution even for supposedly dare conditions, while others kill innocent with bombs. This is what I've felt after watching the video. Good luck to these manufacturers who serve the niche with such a passion. It needs a lion share of compassion to be able to design this kind of products for handicapped people.
- iagooar 11mo agoI saw the keyboard to be operated by the left hand only and here is my (totally personal and somewhoat adjacent) problem with it. My left hand is the one which has suffered the most the many hours of using a keyboard over the last +-25 years. While the right hand has the occasional break from the keyboard when using the mouse, the left hand is constantly glued to the keyboard. It also has a much tougher job - all the cmd, ctrl, alt and shift + combinations are mostly done using the left hand - e.g. on Mac you cannot cmd+shift+ select text with the arrows - you must use the left hand - so it ends up doing so much more work. I wonder if there are other people with the same problem. My right hand never hurts after many hours of computer work - but the left hand does. It hurts even now that I am typing and I haven't even spent more than an hour doing it.
- stavros 11mo agoYou should remap ctrl/cmd (whatever feels better) to caps lock. It'll be much more convenient.
- etothepii 11mo agoCheck out make caps lock great again. https://github.com/Vonng/Capslock https://github.com/Vonng/Capslock
- gcanyon 11mo agoI'm at the point where I need to redefine cmd-z, x, c, v because my left thumb doesn't want to do that dance anymore. It's been painful for a year, and I finally got to the point of redefining it a couple weeks ago. And the muscle memory is so ingrained that I changed it to option ', 1, 2, 3 and never thought about the idea that my right hand could do it.
- __s 11mo agoI was getting hand pain, switched to a Totem keyboard. 38 keys, 6 thumb keys. Column splay & never reaching for number row has greatly helped. 20g actuation means little force needed
- dandersch 11mo ago
- lolive 11mo agoLike people trying to find new interfaces for music making [thank god touchscreens!], there are people trying to figure out new hardware for interacting with computers. Thank you dudes! PS: the first step towards feeling why such research is so important is when you start customizing productivity shortcuts on your existing keyboard. Then you understand that the input device in front of you can be more than a stupid typewriter. From there you start interrogating your interaction with machines. [and then you are addict, and you end up designing your own device :)]
- mcdow 11mo agoSuper cool!
- jorisboris 11mo agoThe right hand keyboard could finally make me look like Boris from Golden Eye typing away while holding a pen in the left hand
- cons0le 11mo agoIf anyone's interested in something way faster that still lets you go one handed. Take a look at the charachorder. You can type one handed, or easily rip 200wpm with 2 hands. But it does take like a year to get fast. I was coming from a moonlander tho so I was ready
- y-curious 11mo agoThank you for sharing, so flipping cool. How do you handle the mouse navigation aspect? That’s one thing missing from my glove80
- helios_tu 11mo agoZMK on the glove80 has mouse control! I use a modified version of this keymap: https://sunaku.github.io/moergo-glove80-keyboard.html#mouse-layer https://sunaku.github.io/moergo-glove80-keyboard.html#mouse-... Essentially, hold down a thumb key and WASD (well, ESDF) moves the mouse.
- fallat 11mo agoI want to pull the trigger on this so badly. I've had my eyes on it for years. It seems the best way to increase typing speed is to reduce finger movement via physical modifications to a keyboard. Does charachorder support Dvorak-like layout mentally? Not a 1-1 but something similar? Like vowels on left hand?
- 392 11mo agoThe best way to speed up is to practice. Alternative layouts are a waste of time unless you're trying to fix an ergonomic / pain issue, and even then the board itself and your technique and lifestyle are more important. I type faster than any Dvorak user I've met and I did nothing make that happen except be impatient. But typing is basically over with now that Whisper is a single button press away.
- fallat 11mo ago
- utopcell 11mo ago..we found an off the shelf keyboard that could work, but we couldn't get it because it was 999 euros. So let's make 7 iterations of our own keyboard with our Formlabs 3d printer, create silicom molds for each key, print legends with our uv printer and we're done. Glad he did though, looks awesome!
- ilitirit 11mo agoThese guys are quite well-known in China and have recently started uploading tto Youtube as well. Their videos are quite entertaining and have extremely high production value compared to many other creators. https://www.youtube.com/@HTXStudio/videos https://www.youtube.com/@HTXStudio/videos I love the one about the automated trash cans.
- hexeater 11mo agoAdd eye tracking to replace the track ball please. :-)
- egypturnash 11mo agoholy crap I want one of these, I spend a ton of time with one hand on my drawing stylus and the other on my keyboard and not having to go as far for right-side shortcuts would be great.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agois it only left-handed?
- kajic 11mo agoNo
- gethly 11mo agoThis looks like all you can eat of the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
- KolenCh 11mo agoInteresting. I worry about its ergonomics though as RSI might develops over time after long term usage of that design. I've been designing my own one-handed keyboard for 3 years. My main problem is that both of my wrist suffers from RSI and either wrist can ocassionally acts up with different levels of pain. (I also have shoulder problem.) They can become practically disabled temporarily for a few weeks, or just quite painful for me to avoid using it. So my desiderata are a bit different from permanently one-handed people. Interestingly my right wrist is acting up in the last couple weeks so I've been going through a iterative redesign phase recently. I probably will write up a blog post in the future when I have the final design, I'm going through it briefly below: Desiderata: (first three are directly from the temporarily and random disabled hand criteria) - primary used for two hands - each hand should be able to single-handedly control the computer - skill transfer from two hand to one hand: since one hand use is oacassional, retraining time should be minimal - based on the research in http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327051hci1101_1 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327051hci1101_... which eventually becomes a producten https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/ https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/ , the concept of a mirror key becomes a requirement: with the hold of a mirror key, the key at the mirror image position is active. An implementation detail is that the mirror key is a dual function key: on tap it is space, on hold it is mirror. I've implemented other possibility but find that the design in this research is better than others I come up with. - symmetric keyboard would facilitate this, where many split keyboards already is. - I must be able to buy them off the shelf. I do not have the skills to design it from scratch, nor do I afford to put more strain to my hand to assemble it from parts. - ergonomic must be one the of the primary goal of the keyboard, to minimize RSI. Speed is not important at all for example. - from my empircal experience, split keyboard, espeicially true split keyboard would encourage a better wrist and shoulder ergonomics. Hence I require split keyboards. Based on these criteria, I bought ZSA Moonlander (QMK based) personally and Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro (ZMK based) for work. The mirror key based design is currently at - Moonlander https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/QwA3z/latest/0 - Adv360 Pro: https://github.com/ickc/Adv360-Pro-ZMK/tree/dev The key concept are that the mirror key can be implemented as a layer, and shift also functionally acts like a mirror. Thumb cluster are then dual function, where on hold a key could be the mirror key (via layer), another key could be the shift key. And since mirror+shift is needed, you either hold both (which is a bit less pleasant for the thumb), or have another layer serves as the shift-mirror key. Over there, every key is implemented as holding shift+key at mirrored position. The ZSA training site is useful to iterate this design process: after each iteration I'd train per single hand and see if it works. For example in my earlier design I mainly focused on testing single left hand use and later found it doesn't quite work for single right hand. Finally, macOS sticky modifier is used to hold modifier with a single hand. I.e. Ctrl+Opt+A becomes Ctrl+Opt, release, A. This is because OSM in QMK cannot handles one-shot of multiple modifiers well. Without doing fancy thing, you need to do Ctrl, release, Opt, release, A. Same design working across Moonlander and Adv360 is important. Layout differences is not that much thankfully, but firmware difference can be a pain. Lastly, I recently bought a Silakka54 for the ocassions where the setup hassle of either is too high. Basically either lap use or going to a meeting. I think my current layout design is adaptable to it but I'll see.
- miladyincontrol 11mo agoI've found pretty good success just using a planck with layers swaping left/right halves. Its not my daily driver but it becomes surprisingly intuitive to do more with less.
- icarnales 11mo agoAfter a stroke I've been using a software version of the half qwerty keyboard, it works quite well and you dot need special hardware, but you don't have integrated mouse, you can achieve that using ahk on windows and Karabiner Elements on Mac. the big advantage is that you keep using the same qwerty layout but mirrored, this makes it easier to learn. http://half-qwerty.com/ http://half-qwerty.com/
- nvlled 11mo agoKind of uneconomical that they have different designs for left-hand and right-hand. They could have just placed the trackball or a nipple in the middle of the keys, and mouse function keys on any side. The hand still need to move and travel anyway with the current design to reach for the mouse keys.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 11mo agoI played with a few alternative keyboard layouts in high school, and I can say from personal experience that it's surprisingly easy to adapt to a one handed mirror layout. You just hold a designated modifier key with your thumb then the whole keyboard flips. Took just a couple days to get to like 80% of my normal typing speed.
- TinyBig 11mo agoIf you already know how to touch type, I recommend using software to mirror your keyboard when the spacebar is held down. I lacked the use of my dominant arm for a few months while recovering from an injury, and by week 3, mirroring no longer required conscious thought.