[TUHS] Typing tutors

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 12:44 PM Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> > I'm not surprised :-)  We were all playing "rogue" back then.  And my
> > favourite terminal was indeed the ADM-3A; it just seemed to be
> > designed for Unix, with the ESC key in the right place etc.
>
> I hated it when the PC-AT came along and moved Ctrl down and Esc up! I
> depend on Ctrl being to the left of A and Esc left of 1, where God
> intended them to be! I used a Sun keyboard with a DIN adapter for years,
> until I came to SDG&E in 2007 and discovered a cache of USB Sun
> keyboards, half with the UNIX layout (yay!) and half with the PC layout
> (boo!) Word got around quickly that I liked them, and I wound up with
> several UNIX layout Sun keyboards. For good measure, I bought a 10-pack
> on eBay, so I'll have spares until the day they peel my cold dead
> fingers away from my UNIX layout keyboard.
>

A few years ago I got to the point where my wrists just wouldn't take it
anymore.

I invested in an Evoluent vertical mouse (3 buttons! Well, really more than
that, but the three in the "correct" positions were the ones I cared about)
and a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. It took me about a week to learn how to
type on the Kinesis, but I can't imagine going back now. I remapped the
'Caps Lock' key to control so that I've got a Control key where one is
supposed to be, but the Esc key is a bit far away. It's not excessively so,
but it is mildly annoying. Still, RSI no longer wakes me up at night, so on
balance the tradeoff has been worth it.

Some colleagues have suggested learning the Dvorak layout; I splurged for
the Kinesis with the double QWERTY/Dvorak keycaps and a mode key and
(relevant to the question here) I found some typing tutor program that
would ostensibly teach me typing again. But like Morse code, it's never
stuck.

        - Dan C.
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