About six months ago I blogged about my Christmas gift to myself: a Svalboard keyboard. It’s a very non-standard design, very science-fictional looking. I wrote about my evolution of ergonomic design for typing in this post about my keyboards and meant to check back in.
What is the experience been now that it’s a daily part of my life?
In short, it’s great. It does the trick, reducing pain and irritation on my hands as I type. Adding the roller balls into the mix has also been interesting, my mousing hand has been healing as well.
How hard was it to adapt to? It’s hard to say, I spent a few weeks working hard at taking lessons on the custom typing app, moving slowly up the speed chart. I would say I could type on it at around 40 words a minute after a few weeks, but I was in the middle of a semester, and I did not move this to my office as a daily driver but kept it at home to use occasionally. By the end of the semester it still felt a little alien, and I had to think when I used it.
Cut to the start of summer, and my home office becomes my daily driver, and I started using the keyboard regularly. As of now, my last test showed 72 words per minute with a 97 percent accuracy rate. I hit a run of keys that tripped me up on a word, if not for that one word I would have hit more of a 98 to 99 percent rate, which is where I sit on a regular keyboard.
I would have adapted faster, were it not for the fact that I have been tinkering with and optimizing my Glyph editing system, which I’ve made tweaks to to consider the Svalboard’s layout more, as I had mostly been using it to edit on my laptop. The Sval’s roller balls mean I have to choose what key I use for a mouse click and right mouse click. I started by using the inner thumb keys, which are also the space keys, which trigger the Glyph movement and editing systems when held down for me now. That works great on all my keyboard setups except for the Sval, which then causes hiccups when I am trying to click and it thinks I really mean spacebar. When the ball is in motion, the key functions change, so what is normally spacebar becomes click as the ball is rolling, and for a split second after it stops. Miss the window, and you’re not clicking the mouse, but hitting space.
Well, that is something some people can internalize, I kept not doing it, so I remapped the keys a bit, and now click is the thumb up key that hooks over the thumb. Less immidiate than the space thumb key, but it doesn’t share any other key functions, all it does is click, and that is working well. But I have experimented with so many remappings of keys that I keep having to rebuild my brain connections and muscle memory, as you can imagine, this much remapping is also a heavy demand on the learning circuits…
…but the more I play, the more my brain goes ‘oh, this BS again, he’s playing around, I suppose we’ll have to adapt.’
I know this seems like a bit much, but seeing how many authors I talk to who experience carpal tunnel pain and reduced ability, whereas I seem to be healing up, and no longer having high pain days the way I used to, I still find this alternate ergonomic keyboard to be one of the greatest health investments short of a gym membership I’ve made in a long time.
Long live the Svalboard, eradicator of repetitive stress injury pain.
As an author, if I were ever to do an infomercial, it would be for this piece of kit. I cannot recommend it enough.