Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmware keyboard (I was also already typing on a split keyboard so that might be part of the reason it was fairly easy to adjust). See https://docs.qmk.fm/features/swap_hands#swap-hands-action

idahoduncan · 3 months ago

I have this set up using kmonad[1], and the following config. Many punctation marks are obviously missing, but I'm sure they could be added with a little thought. The mirrored layout is toggled by holding the space key.

    (defalias
      lhs (tap-next-release spc (layer-toggle ytrewq)))
    
    (deflayer ytrewq
      _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           bspc 0    9    8    7    6    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           _    p    o    i    u    y    _    _    _    _    _    _    _         _
           ret  ;    l    k    j    h    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           lsft /    .    ,    m    n    _    _    _    _    _    _         _    _
      _    _    _    _              _              _    _              _    _    _)

1. https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

behnamoh · 3 months ago

kmonad:

    written in Haskell
    config in Lisp

Best of both worlds!

fouronnes3 · 3 months ago

I am low key thinking about trying this without any disability, as a way of always keeping the right hand on the mouse.

bravesoul2 · 3 months ago

I like the idea. Don't you love those words like "creed" or "scare" that can be typed with one hand!

ahonhn · 3 months ago

I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(

komali2 · 3 months ago

Does your usual computer activity require a lot of mouse work? Ten years ago I went down this path when my coworker caught me adding bindings to my mouse buttons. He sat me down at his machine and showed me vim wasn't just an old fart text editor and that the bindings can be used in other editors.

Ofc if you're not doing text based work this wouldn't apply.

barbazoo · 3 months ago

Foot pedal maybe? Or maybe a dedicated mouse button.

faizshah · 3 months ago

I had the same experience, my typing speed with two hands is 90-120 but with one hand i can still get 50-70. The hard part is punctuation but with AI these days you could try just prompting and let the AI deal with syntax for you.

haiku2077 · 3 months ago

Right, you could run your text through an LLM that adds punctuation and then fix up the result manually. Would probably save time + fatigue

bravesoul2 · 3 months ago

That's a fast speed. I practice to get to 60 then said well, that's good enough!

bryanlarsen · 3 months ago

Yes, I was just going to make this suggestion. If it's a temporary problem, you probably don't want a solution that requires extensive retraining to use. A mirrored keyboard takes advantage of existing brain wiring.

autohotkey layout: https://github.com/hanmindev/mirrorboard

xkb layout: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

jfengel · 3 months ago

In a quick experiment, I found that utterly baffling. On zero practice, it was much faster for me to type with just my left hand. (Though it requires me to keep looking at the keyboard, because I'm leaving the home position.)

arjvik · 3 months ago

Randall Munroe talks about exactly this:

https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html

sillystuff · 3 months ago

I'll second the steep learning curve for the twiddler. I never got up to a typing speed on it that was not horribly, frustratingly, slow. But, I only needed it for a couple months.

Like OP's relative, I also could not use my dominant arm, nor have my arm in a position that would allow typing one handed on a regular keyboard. The twiddler was the only commercially available option that I was able to find that would allow me to type in this state. So, another recommendation of twiddler, but with the caveat that the original had several warts, and while they appear to be redesigned, they may still suffer from some of them.

The velcro strap to hold it to the hand, combined with the shape of the keyboard, allowed it to shift position while typing making it harder to use. Photos of the current models show they have a different shape now. Maybe this is less of a problem now? They are also wireless now, so there isn't a wire constantly pulling it out of position whenever you move.

The keyboard markings rubbed off completely after only a few weeks of use on my OG twiddler. Hopefully they have worked that manufacturing issue out for the current models.

ggerules · 3 months ago

I've also used an early version of the twiddler. It is a very nice keyboard with mouse integration. It seems they have upgraded the product.

https://www.mytwiddler.com/

neilv · 3 months ago

Thirded on Twiddler. I didn't use it myself, but I worked with some people who were very productive with it. One was even said to have written their dissertation laying down, with a Twiddler and a HUD.

Separate from that, when I've temporarily injured one hand/arm or the other, typing on a QWERTY keyboard wasn't that slow for me. Especially if I typed all-lowercase. Though my normal typing style has two hands moving around the keyboard a bit; I don't know whether traditional home-row typists would fine one-handed more difficult.

(Just be careful when Web searching about this topic at work, since it's bumping into an old euphemism joke on Reddit.)

lburton · 3 months ago

rowla · 3 months ago

One-handed typer here – well, one hand and one finger, and it’s been like this for all my life. Your friend may want to consider text macro tools such as Keyboard Maestro for macOS. There are many others, but KM will also launch apps and do other magic for me just by typing two or three letters. Create a list of frequently used words or segments, define a generic expansion key (in my case #) that doesn’t require a modifier. I have more than 1000 of these macros, and it really helps with all those long words in my native German. Dictation may also help, although I find that it leads my thoughts in different directions when I see words appear on the screen as I speak.

donatj · 3 months ago

My dad has the same situation, one arm and one finger on said arm - the beefiest pinky you've ever seen.

He does most of his typing these days with voice-to-text on his Android phone, and he's pretty adept with it. Otherwise he gets by pretty well with a standard Apple keyboard. He's not winning any speed awards but he does alright.

etoxin · 3 months ago

Arm amputee programmer here. There are some wild hardware solutions out there.

What I found best was

- a standard qwerty keyboard (I didn't want to be restricted to custom keyboards)

- A learning program called Five Finger Typist. https://www.spectronics.com.au/product/five-finger-typist-2-...

Basically I'm hybrid touch typing. Because I cover the whole keyboard as I type the chance for error increases the longer I type. I quickly glance to know where i'm aligned.

In hindsight I should have learnt to use the F and J notches more.

I have extensively remapped my IDE shortcuts to be easier to trigger.

kldg · 3 months ago

I severely burned most of dominant hand about a decade ago in a grease fire. One-handing the whole keyboard was fine enough (70-100wpm to 15-20wpm) that I didn't bother looking for a better solution, but I was able to use the injured hand enough to press modifier keys as needed. Unless they plan on working while recovering, I'd try out not making any explicit modifications. Good excuse to catch up on movie-watching.

synack · 3 months ago

Last year I had an injury that left me one handed for a few months. I managed to hunt-and-peck my way to a patched QMK firmware for an Adafruit Macropad I had lying around. I set it up with the artsey.io layout and set the cheatsheet as my desktop wallpaper.

I found the Learning Artsey book from Discord helpful and managed to get up to 15 WPM in about a week with regular practice. Still quite tedious for coding, but good enough for emails and IRC.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128

https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/qmk_firmware/tree/artsey_ma...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/artseyio/artsey/main/layou...

https://discord.gg/UAMMaASc

colgandev · 3 months ago

First of all, condolences to your friend and cool of you to look into this.

Back in the day I switched to Dvorak and came across the "one handed Dvorak layout. This may be what you are referring to. I haven't tried it much but those layouts could be a temporary solution. I found Qwerty to be a lot easier to type one handed straight up because Dvorak tries to alternate hands between keys.

I recently discovered Talon, an open source app for voice control of basically everything on a machine that requires no typing at all. I saw some people are using it even if they can use their hands, as a power tool. It appears to be fully Python scriptable and also gives you some nice speech to text abilities too.

It allows you to specify a bunch of keywords for typing symbols and it looks like some people can do full coding quite quickly.

Perhaps this injury could be an opportunity to try something like this and become more powerful than before?

Best of luck and recovery to your friend.

https://talonvoice.com/

janice1999 · 3 months ago

Talon is not open source as far as I know. It's freeware with Patreon early access and support. The community plugins cover a wide range of applications and are easy to modify. I also found their Slack good for discussing accessibility options like gaze tracking. It looks like development has slowed significantly but the developer recently rewrote the core in Rust.

Ah, that's my mistake, thanks!

jonah-archive · 3 months ago

kace91 · 3 months ago

Any specifics on the kind of typing they need?

If it’s human text (as opposed to code), one handed swipe style typing on a smartphone can get really fluid, and it’s relatively easy to get for someone who is a touch typer. I’d check on ways to use that as computer input if needed.