Using multiple keyboards

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Posted by: stak
Tags: mozilla
Posted on: 2016-04-18 09:32:45

When typing on a laptop keyboard, I find that my posture tends to get very closed and hunched. To fix this I resurrected an old low-tech solution I had for this problem: using two keyboards. Simply plug in an external USB keyboard, and use one keyboard for each hand. It's like a split keyboard, but better, because you can position it wherever you want to get a posture that's comfortable for you.

I used to do this on a Windows machine back when I was working at RIM and it worked great. Recently I tried to do it on my Mac laptop, but ran into the problem where the modifier state from one keyboard didn't apply to the other keyboard. So holding shift on one keyboard and T on the other wouldn't produce an uppercase T. This was quite annoying, and it seems to be an OS-level thing. After some googling I found Karabiner which solves this problem. Well, really it appears to be a more general keyboard customization tool, but the default configuration also combines keys across keyboards which is exactly what I wanted. \o/

Of course, changing your posture won't magically fix everything - moving around regularly is still the best way to go, but for me personally, this helps a bit :)

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	Using multiple keyboards
Home Blog Snippets About All timestamps are based on your local time of:	Posted by: stak Tags: mozilla Posted on: 2016-04-18 09:32:45 When typing on a laptop keyboard, I find that my posture tends to get very closed and hunched. To fix this I resurrected an old low-tech solution I had for this problem: using two keyboards. Simply plug in an external USB keyboard, and use one keyboard for each hand. It's like a split keyboard, but better, because you can position it wherever you want to get a posture that's comfortable for you. I used to do this on a Windows machine back when I was working at RIM and it worked great. Recently I tried to do it on my Mac laptop, but ran into the problem where the modifier state from one keyboard didn't apply to the other keyboard. So holding shift on one keyboard and T on the other wouldn't produce an uppercase T. This was quite annoying, and it seems to be an OS-level thing. After some googling I found Karabiner which solves this problem. Well, really it appears to be a more general keyboard customization tool, but the default configuration also combines keys across keyboards which is exactly what I wanted. \o/ Of course, changing your posture won't magically fix everything - moving around regularly is still the best way to go, but for me personally, this helps a bit :) [ Add a new comment ]

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