You’re Missing Out on The Best Keyboard Experience
It’s 2025. There’s no reason to use your grandparent’s keyboard any longer.
In this no-nonsense guide, I’m gonna walk you through hardware, software, typing technique, ergonomics — you name it. When I’m done with you, you’ll be squeezing every ounce of productivity out of your keyboard.
But before starting, let me clarify some things:
Who is this guide for?
This guide is only for programmers or writers who are willing to go the extra mile to get things done.
If you are just getting started on your productivity journey, this is not for you — Close your device and take a walk in nature. Forget all about it. There are myriads of easier entry-level improvements that will take you very far (terminals, text editors, system shortcuts, and so on).
You’ll know when you’re ready to mess with your keyboard. I’ll be waiting.
Will you type faster with the help of this guide?
It depends.
The human mind can reach high proficiency even out of mediocre instruments.
The medieval lute, a precursor of the modern guitar, is an example of this. It detunes just by looking at it, but that didn’t stop the best players from becoming virtuosos, probably motivated by the risk of decapitation shall they offend the court with a wrong note.
In the same way, a lot of people are already at peak speeds even on godawful Qwerty keyboards, and there’s not much this guide can do for them in terms of raw speed.
In short, if you are a slow typer, this guide will make you fast. And if you are already a speed-typing demon, this guide will unlock even greater, subtler benefits.
Alright, enough chit-chat. Let’s get to it.
History of The Keyboard
Humans, along with other social animals, exchange information with their peers through a set of mutually understood conventions.
If you are reading this guide, I’m afraid to say that you have suffered years of indoctrination in a particular convention — written language — which has robbed you of a natural state of blissful ignorance.
You can blame your parents, the school system, the British Empire, the Neolithic Revolution, or our decadent civilization at large. In any case, it’s too late now. We must move forward. Sorry.
There have always been ways of writing at the speed of speech. This is known as short-hand, and it was used by stenographers and court reporters to take down proceedings verbatim even in ancient Greece.
But if you’re interested in writing in a way that doesn’t need years of training and doesn’t look like Picasso’s sex life transcribed by a chimp with a pen, the 19th century’s got your back.
The first commercially successful typewriter was released in 1868. It allowed anyone to write, provided they knew how to press buttons really hard. That was the birth of the Qwerty keyboard layout.
The next few decades saw a flurry of activity in the field. The concept of the keyboard was incorporated into the telegraph and the printing press. Soon, a telegraph operator could send messages without frantically moving a lever up and down like a fucking idiot, and a typesetter could typeset without having to manually arrange each letter.
This gave birth to magazines, newspapers, and ultimately to the narcotic pleasures of mass media and propaganda. Progress!
In our modern day, we have computers, devilish contraptions that can do anything as long as it’s allowed by the laws of physics and Aristotelian logic. Our main way to interact with them is — and will probably be for a long time — the Qwerty keyboard.
This time, the keyboard is not used only to generate text, but also to give commands. Any combination of keys, whether alphanumeric or not, can be interpreted arbitrarily by a piece of software.
That’s why Ctrl+C is often used as a key combination that instructs the machine to perform a copy. It doesn’t mean that you literally control the sea, you are not Aquaman.
But I think we can do a little bit better. And that’s what this guide is all about.
Hardware
Now that you know the origins of the keyboard, it’s time to up your game.
Row-staggered (aka the classic)
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the standard keyboard design. A theory is that the weird “row-staggered” layout was designed to make it harder for typists to type fast, so that they wouldn’t jam the mechanical levers inside the machine. But this is just a conspiracy theory, and it has been allegedly debunked by people who actually know things.
These days, the rise of 3D printing has enabled a noble army of nerds to experiment with diabolical new keyboard designs, and the results are amazing.
The race is on to develop the perfect “ergonomic” keyboard. Ergonomic keyboards are designed to reduce strain on the hands and wrists, and they come in different forms.
Orthogonal
One of them is “orthogonal”, which means that the keys are laid out in a square grid.
Take a moment to look at your open hand, your fingers look like rays of sunlight emanating from the center of your palm. Trippy!
However, if you put your hand on a flat surface and flex your fingers, you will notice that they actually follow a straight, parallel pattern.
Orthogonal keyboards are designed to take advantage of this natural movement of your fingers.
They are often criticized for being “non-standard”, but this is only because they are not standard yet!
Column-staggered
If you want to do one better, get a “column-staggered” keyboard, in which the columns are slightly offset from each other to account for the different lengths of your fingers.
Split
Then there are the “split” keyboards, which, as the name implies, are split in two.
Now you can type while sitting in a manly way, with a straight back and arms at shoulder length.
Non-split keyboards might have made sense when typing was an activity relegated to oppressed females trapped in dark Victorian offices while their very body shape was forced into a feeble submissive position by the patriarchal tool in front of them.
Say no more to such nonsense! Get a split keyboard and sit straight!
Thumb-Cluster
Then there’s the thumb-cluster. The key insight here is that the thumb is usually used only to type the space bar, which to be fair is the most used key on the keyboard, but it’s a bit of a waste.
A thumb-cluster gives each thumb a set of extra keys, often programmable, which can be used for all sorts of shortcuts.
So, which keyboard should you get? Easy, get an Ergodox or a Moonlander. They have all the features described so far. It’s the state of the art.
Sure, they are expensive. But what are you, poor? Just pay up, bitch.
Alternative Keyboard Layouts
Just like giving a rimjob to Benedict Cumberbatch won’t make you Turing complete, using an alternative keyboard layout won’t make you a 10x programmer by itself.
Still, exploring the possibilities beyond Qwerty is a worthwhile endeavour.
The most popular alternative layouts are Dvorak and Colemak. They were designed to increase typing efficiency and comfort by optimizing the key placement based on which keys are used the most.
I personally recommend Colemak. It just feels like silk on my fingers, and it’s designed to be an easy transition from Qwerty.
As mentioned before, if you are already a fast Qwerty typist, you probably won’t see a huge difference in terms of raw speed. The main benefit of these layouts is comfort.
Comfort
This might sound trivial, but comfort must not be underestimated. Especially as we get old, we’ll appreciate the time invested by our younger selves to preserve energy on the very tool that makes us unique among all living things: the majestic Homo Sapiens hand and its opposable thumb.
Furthermore, one must not ignore the psychological impact of committing thoughts to text in the highest comfort. Imagine how more epic the Iliad would have been if Homer, the king of poets, preserved the oral tradition at the root of the western canon using Colemak.
Sorry if I’m being rough but let me be clear: It is a disrespect to the entire human race to resist the call of comfy hands, as you would never produce your best work. Any professional writer would agree with this.
Touch-typing
Naturally, these layouts work best if you take the time to learn how to touch type. Touch-typing is a skill that allows you to type fast without looking at the keyboard, and it looks cool as fuck.
I recommend Colemak Club and keybr.com to learn to touch-type, and then Monkeytype to gain speed.
Keep in mind, learning a new keyboard form-factor, layout, and typing technique at the same time can make you feel like having a stroke for days or weeks. But it’s well worth the effort.
Software
Just use vim.
Consider also a browser extension like Vimium to navigate the web at the speed of thought. You won’t regret it.
Closing thoughts
We are entering a golden age of keyboarding. You don’t want to be left behind, and you definitely don’t want to miss your chance to impress ladies at coffee shops by pulling out your ergo split keyboard.
Keep in mind, this guide is just the tip of the iceberg. The world of keyboarding is vast and full of mysteries, just like the universe itself.
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