It's been a couple of months now since the Kinesis arrived and it's been pretty solid although a bit slow, however things are picking up and I am getting used to it every day. The ache in my wrist is completely gone, although it was only slight anyhow.
I stuck to what I had read in reviews and did not use a standard keyboard for the first month and it slowed me down to a dead crawl. The first few nights I attempted to do some online touch tying lessons and then carried on using it in my daily work. I can see now why isolation is a good thing, even now when i type on my laptop I find it strange. Not strange in a bad way though, I still don't truly touch type on a standard keyboard, only on the Kinesis because I find standard keyboards so damn cramped.
The best part I found was the ability to create macros to save you time and also to re-map keys so you don't have to stretch all over the place to get to the keys you commonly use.
Macros
There are a couple of awesome features, the first of them is the macros which is the ability to enter strings of characters and recall these with a series of key presses. You can't use a modifier key to trigger a macro i.e. Shift but you can use Ctrl. However do not make the mistake I did and map a macro directly to a single key! Which meant to trigger the email macro key I would have to press the function key + enable/disable macro key, then press the letter e and then press function and disable again. Otherwise just pressing E would reel off my email address mid sentence. A real DOH moment right there.
Here's the thing, I use a lot of Ctrl + key shortcuts within programs such as vim, terminator, awesomewm, midnight commander, so my thought of using Ctrl + key for a macro has got to be something that I don't use day to day. To avoid any complication I have mapped the numerics as macros and made them easier to remember by using the alpha key underneath the numeric to remind me of what it is. Here's what is stored for me
Ctrl + 6 (over the letter u)
My username for sites
Ctrl + 3 (over the letter e)
My email address "chris@digitalunity.co.uk"
Ctrl + 1 (over the letter q)
Query "$str_sql = '"
Ctrl + 4 (over the letter r)
Resultset "$result = $this->db->query($str_sql);"
I'm sure there are more useful macros to create although I haven't thought of any as yet.
You could even do a full irssi connect, login and join i.e.
>irssi
>/connect -ssl freenode.net
>/nick digitalunity_uk
>/msg nickserv indentify mypassword
>/join #channel
although with the last example you would need the Professional keyboard as you can only record 56 keystrokes per macro on the Advantage and classic.
Re-mapping Keys
The second was the ability to swap the keys around physically and re-map them within the keyboard memory.
The first thing I noticed was how strange some of the key placements were, especially being a PHP dev we all use the minus sign a lot such as $object->method(); and I also use the underscore a lot in variable names such as $str_company_name = ''; Now the > sign is easy to get to and remember but I found that the standard layout places the minus sign and underscore on my little finger which after a short while began to ache. So I moved the minus sign to the place of the numeric six and moved all the characters one along to the right.
Then there are the up and down cursor keys, I swapped these around so that they matched the same fingers as up and down within vim which is j and k.
Then the escape key is also on a pinkey key, it's awkward to reach all the way to the rubber keys. As I don't have much use of the Caps Lock key so I removed the caps lock key function and replaced it with Left Shift, bear with me on this one... Then Swapped Left shift with Caps Lock. Yes you are right in thinking I now do not have a Caps Lock key but using a keylogger over the period of a few days I realised that I don't actually use the key anyhow. So now my hands don't need to move to get to escape.
The only outstanding issue is the strange placement of the brackets which when pressing, mean that you have to curl your fingers under on the right hand. After a few months this became second nature and I would suggest that given a couple of months, even if you remapped every key, you would soon be back to touch typing again.
All-in-all the Kinesis is a heck of a lot comfier than a standard keyboard and well work the money in my opinion. The keypresses require much less movement and therefore gives a more comfortable experience and although the ten key number pad is embedded, the reduction on space between mouse and keyboard is far better. Having said that, I have just purchased a touchpad which sits in the middle so my hands no longer need to leave the keyboard!
