(2 July 2024)
It’s been quiet round these parts for a while, mainly because my shoulder has been expressing strong opinions about my habit of typing for a living.
The pain, all around the shoulder and often shooting down the arm into my wrist, has been such that I’ve had to take drastic steps. Typing a lot less is one of them (tricky, in my line of work); investing in fancy new keyboards is another.
Meet the Keychron Q11: a split keyboard that plays nicely with Macs. It’s my new friend.
It’s not cheap at £200, but I’m hoping the investment will pay off. I bought it from The Keyboard Company in Salisbury, who couldn’t have been more helpful when I phoned them up with a long list of questions. I’d recommend them if you’re in a similar boat to me.
I’ve never used a split keyboard before and I was a little apprehensive. What I’ve found is that simply being split isn’t the issue - I think if I could tear one of my existing Apple keyboards in half, I’d be able to type on it just fine.
What’s challenging is the extra keys at the right and left edges that my fingers aren’t used to. I keep miss-hitting the left Shift key, and the Enter key, because my hands reach out beyond them, seeking out the far edge of the keyboard. So that’s something I’m having to get used to.
There are some pros, to compensate for the cons. This is a programmable keyboard, and there’s a row of macro keys down the left side that you can program to do almost anything. I’ve mapped them as follows:
M1: Cut
M2: Copy
M3: Paste
M4: Nothing, I keep hitting it instead of Shift
M5: Mission control
Using Keyboard Maestro, I’ve also created a macro that opens the Application Switcher when I double-tap the §/± key. I’m pretty sure that overuse of the Command+Tab shortcut is one of the causes of my pain problem in the first place.
There are two knobs in the top corners. They’re both set up for audio control at the moment and I haven’t worked out how to make them do different things. But I like being able to turn a knob to control volume, or press it in to mute sound.
Unlike almost every other split keyboard I could find, this one is very Mac friendly. It has a Mac/Windows switch at the back, and mine came ready for Mac out of the box. There are replacement Windows keycaps if you want to use them, but I was delighted to see the Mac Command key there by default. All the function keys at the top do all the Mac things you’d expect - controlling brightness, pausing and playing media, etc.
A combination of this new keyboard, exercise, rest and lifestyle changes has brought the pain under control now. I can finally type for fun once again. In small doses, mind you. Only a bit of typing fun, for now.
giles (at) gilest.org