Same!

It is pretty easy to build your own now as there are hot swap PCBs that don’t require soldering.

The worst part of having a small orthro board is staring at the hundred nice looking keycaps that have no home on your board after buying a set and putting on your base 48 keys.

Sidenote, but I’ll also do one-hand 5-finger typing on a cellphone screen, because it’s faster than thumbs even with the input lag. Or I did, until I got hooked on word-swiping.

I know I’m biased from years of practice doing it this way, but I still kinda believe that most people don’t because they didn’t take a few minutes out of their day for a week or two to really focus on their hands as they input. Instead, they’ll focus on shifting around their hardware and software, even though rewriting your wetware really doesn’t take that long and is far more portable. I even suspect that the 60-key enthusiasts are actually just tricking themselves into this kind of focus as a kind of oblique strategy.

Not really. It's the obsession with home row that creates wrist-twisting.

> What we really need to do for PC keyboards is split the keyboard into two halves and get rid of the typewriter column stagger.

I'm self-taught and instead use the edges of the keyboard to orient myself, and use my shoulders and elbows to move my forearm inwards from a very different resting positing. Not much wrist movement.

(for anyone curious, my usual resting keys are around shift/a/w/d/space and alt/l/p/[/] on a US qwerty keyboard, but it's not strict)

1. A flat seat, without back

2. No wrist support.

This system for the shortcuts is only a few hours. A lot of it is phonetic, and the numbers are in binary. Numpad is binary + *, and function keys are binary + r.

So if you know binary and can hold one of three extra keys, you now have three ways to do numbers and the only difference is one key.

Shift+num works for punctuation too, so you don't really need to know all the punctuation shortcuts. You just need to remember what they are on a regular keyboard and then its just sh+binary.

The other things you'd need to know are how letters work (the ones not shown), and the shortcut combinations, but there are not that many of those, and they stack on top of each other visually.

You'd just need a 10-key keyboard, or toggle plover on and off to use this dictionary.

If you mean the rest of plover/steno, its a drastically higher learning curve and is basically a hobby for me. Just being able to fingerspell (type single letters) is learning another keyboard layout. But this combines several of my interests, so its not bad for me.

Learning wise, I am a huge Supermemo fan, so I just use that to memorize/review the stuff that needs it beyond learning the theory (which I also review in Supermemo). Most people would use Anki or Mochi.

Two-shift caps lock is a feature whereby tapping both shift keys, simultaneously, toggles caps lock.

You don't need the caps lock key, and its place on the home row is absurd.

Being a Windows user I have an AHK script I run on every PC I work on regularly. It remaps Caps Lock into a special modifier key but does so in a conditionally timed way which keeps Caps Lock working as it normally does as an on/off toggle - but only when pressed and released by itself. If I use Caps Lock like a modifier key by holding it down and hitting another key simultaneously then Caps Lock works like a modifier - which I use to remap other home row keys like arrows etc.

This works transparently while giving me another very useful modifier key right on the home row without giving anything up. It's especially useful on laptops where I don't have extra modifier keys like my custom desktop keyboards but I now use it everywhere. Here's the relevant chunk of AHK script:

  CapsLock::
   KeyWait, CapsLock                      ; wait for Capslock to be released
   KeyWait, CapsLock, D T0.2              ; and pressed again within 0.2 seconds
   if ErrorLevel
   return
    else
   if (A_PriorKey = "CapsLock")
      SetCapsLockState, % GetKeyState("CapsLock","T") ? "Off" : "On" 
  return

  *CapsLock::
  return

  #If, GetKeyState("CapsLock", "P")   ;Your CapsLock hotkeys go below
   i::Send {Up}
   j::Send {Left}
   k::Send {Down}
   l::Send {Right}
   m::Send {End}
   u::Send {Home}
   y::Send {PgUp}
   n::Send {PgDn}
   h::Send {BS}
   `;::Send {Delete}
   -::Send {–} ; Alt+Minus = En dash
   =::Send {—} ; Shift+Alt+Minus = Em dash
   a::^a
   Space::Enter
   q::PrintScreen
   r::F5
   s::Browser_Back
   d::Browser_Forward 

  Capslock & LButton::WindowMouseDragMove()
  Capslock & RButton::WindowMouseDragResize()

It's a strict superset of QWERTY, and it enables entering e.g. è and È with altgr+e and shift+altgr+e respectively.

Truly a horrible underdeveloped world we live in, that we have to hack together our configs and code to this degree and having to watch as no wheel in existence can ever be as good as the one I just now built in five minutes.

(terribly sorry for the bitter sarcasm, it's a pain point of mine)