"The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text."

To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.

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alpaca128 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into.

On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.

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dylan604 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys.

As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal.

Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically.

I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.

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goosedragons 2 days ago | parent [-]

Nah dawg. I was a practiced touch typist for years. We had oodles of typing in elementary school. Pain in my pinkies didn't get better. Only worse because keys like {}| are far more important in programming than writing English and add to pinkie stress. Switching to a Kinesis Advantage with thumb keys and layers to put keys like {} under better fingers resolved my problem.

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throw10920 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, the parent's implication is just wrong:

> As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory.

Becoming a good typist doesn't magically change your pinkie from being the weakest finger on your hand to the strongest. That's basic anatomy. And, specifically if you are a good typist, then your neutral hand position will absolutely involve stretching your pinkie to hit enter/backspace/shift - they're exactly wrong with their assertion.

I'm vaguely aware of the Kinesis Advantage - it looks like a pretty solid ergonomic keyboard (although it may not be for me because it's not a split keyboard and my shoulders are pretty wide). Does the software do QMK stuff like mod-tap?

	▲	goosedragons 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, firmware on the Advantage 2 (what I have) does allow some QMK type stuff like mod-tap. They call it "tap and hold". It's more limited than QMK from my understanding (e.g., only 1 layer, tap and hold only on certain keys) but for my uses cases it's been fine. While it's not a true split, the key wells are ~6" apart which is plenty IMO. They do have the similar Advantage 360 Professional which is a true split and uses ZMK for more programmability.

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KingEllis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I had never considered until now that my left thumb never touches the keyboard.

	▲	adornKey 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think having Shift available for the thumb would help a lot (in the middle just below Space bar). Most experimental layouts that add more features make the mistake to overload it, some of these things even look totally thumb-driven.... This make everything very confusing. Just Shift for a start, would be good. The pinky is too much overloaded. Offloading some of it to the thumb would actually be an improvement.