August 25, 2020
My second day with the Ergodox EZ keyboard
My first day with the Ergodox
was not all that great.
I could not get live training to work.
I sent an email to Ergodox with a description of my troubles,
and the next morning I had an email from Tisha in reply.
Who could ask for more than that?
The email had a new keyboard layout, "just for me" that I needed to
flash into the keyboard. Normally this would be a source of great
trepidation as I have always been taught to avoid this unless there is
no other option. But it seems entirely normal and routine to reflash
the Ergodox, so I learn the process and do it.
I do the whole thing on my Fedora 32 system.
It is entirely straightforward and gives me no problems.
Best of all, live training works now!
And it works fine to have two keyboards plugged in, which makes it easy to quickly type
this with my old keyboard and have the Ergodox off to the side.
Learning
The alphabet is fairly straightforward and my touch typing skills serve me well.
I have deeply ingrained muscle memory for a "normal" keyboard that is not ortholinear
and it will take time to get into the groove with the Ergodox.
There are only a few keys (on the lower row) that this is an issue with.
The really big challenge is going to be special symbols, parenthesis, brackets,
mathematical operators, and that sort of thing. I am not crossing this bridge yet,
but may need to look at some other peoples layouts and give this some thought.
I am a programmer after all, first and foremost.
Hyper and Meh
The idea here is a bit strange. These keys emit what looks to your system like an
impossible combination of key presses. The idea is that this is a gateway of some
kind to generated "hot keys" to launch applications, or who knows what.
There is a start of an explanation in the following rather good review,
and a more detailed discussion of where it all started in the second link.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!