Hello everyone! I found this community just a few days ago, it's
really great! I already found some really interesting projects! Now I would like to share my ideas relating keyboards I have so far. I'm starting this thread mainly because I found out there is no user report of the
Yogitype keyboard yet, which I have at the moment for testing. More you can read below.
I've been looking for ergonomic solutions for keyboards for quite some time already, especially in the past few weeks. A year ago I switched to a different keyboard layout, Neo2. It is optimized for the german language, but also has some additional layers, which are especially useful for programming and text navigation (and more). FYI, the layers you can find on the main page of the
Neo Website.
So there's the Neo2 keyboard layout, but there are some
plans/ideas for an own, more ergonomic keyboard. They also have quite long
list of existing ergonomic keyboards in their wiki, though it's not very up to date (mainly 3 years old; I just added ErgoDox).
More recently I want a keyboard/mouse combination or something similar because of a slight pain in my righ wrist. Also
working mouseless is an interesting option, as discussed in that topic.
When looking for vertical keyboards, the Yogitype appeared to me the best solution available. I liked the idea of the integrated mouse. I was very uncertain whether I want to buy it because of the price, but finally decided to use the three week test possibility, as it was the most promising product.
I now have a Yogitype on my desk, but I have to say that I will send it back. I was very disappointed about the integrated mouse because I thought it was something like a Joystick being able to move in any direction and any angle. But instead you can only move it in eight directions – up, down, left, right and four directions in between. This means you can move your mouse only in eight fixed directions with one fixed speed. In addition I think it's no very easy to move the stick in the diagonal directions. I am not sure if it's designed for only the directions up/down/left/right, because the stick somehow "preferably" stays in those positions – moving to a diagonal position feels like driving up a curb with the bicycle, lol.
Any way, the stick-mouse is just
way too slow for working, especially if you have a lot of display space. Switching windows and clicking through menus is very uncomfortable. By the way, this was also the reason why I started to try to do more with the keyboard. At this point, the
i3 window manager or similar ones are very interesting – I think I will give it a try.
So if the Yogitype had something like a TrackPoint instad, it would be much more interesting to me.
During time I got some other ideas about how to improve the concept. Even before I found this community I had the idea to use the thumb for more than only Space and Mouse. I was wondering why the thumb isn't positioned on the opposite side of the keys of the other fingers – like if you would hold a tennis ball. You could have several keys and/or mouse functionalities there.
On keyboards like the
ErgoDox you alreay have several thumb keys, but the thumb is in the "traditional" position, as it's not designed to be a vertical keyboard. On a keyboard like the Yogitype you could probably even put a mousepad for the thumb which might then be usable without moving the other fingers from their standard position (e.g. asdf).
But even more. Actually you could put really a lot of functionality for the thumb as you have much more space for it on a vertical keyboard than on a traditional one! I provide you with some pictures. On the left side you see the front view, on the right side the
top view with exactly the same thumb position. You can see that there's a lot of potential space for both thumbs, at least for five buttons for each.
I would
really love to have something like this. I guess I have to do it on my own – or does anybody know a similar project or someone doing such things?
A radial positioning of the thumb keys would result in a less portable keyboard, but maybe you can solve that.
Let's get back to the Yogitype. Another part of the integrated mouse is the scrolling function, which actually is quite cool. It would be even possible to scroll sideways, but sadly this didn't work for me. I am using GNU/Linux and X11, and the
xev command used to track keyboard and mouse events didn't show up anything when moving sideways. I don't know if it's a matter of software/driver or if the Yogitype doesn't send anything. I didn't step deeper to find that out.
I told you a lot about the integrated mouse function – time to switch to the keyboard. And if it's about typing, I am really positively impressed! I really love to have the hands in a vertical position! It feels very natural and I think that a 90 degrees angle is ergonomic and better than 20 degrees you have with a Kinesis contoured.
I also really like the armrests. It's like a cushion, has a leather surface and feels comfortable – but that's not the point. It's important so that you don't have to hold your hands/arms in the air all the time. I'm asking myself how users of products like the SafeType are working. Maybe they have their own armrests. At least in SafeType the armrests are not included in the concept. Yogitype-users can fix the armrests with a velcro at his preferred position. When fixed, they still can be moved forwards and backwards in one direction which gives you extra flexibility. The restoring force increases with distance to the normal position. I really like this.
Here I provide you with some photos. The first one shows the armrest in a relaxed position, the other ones at the forward/backward maximum – which is really more than needed.
Another importat thing at the Yogitype is the positioning of the keys. You maybe have noticed that I have a german keyboard layout, but it's quite similar to qwerty layouts. This is a photo of the quertz-de layout:
The first you may see is that the function keys (F1-F12) are at the top:
So if you want to press Alt+F4 you have to do a special move. I didn't like that so much, but maybe you get used to it. But there are more combinations which are uncomfortable. As the
Alt key is only on the left side and therefore only reachable with the left hand,
Alt+Tab is not very nice to press.
Strg+Tab is ok, even if you do that using only your left hand.
If you want to make use of several layers (or keyboard shortcuts), not only using
Shift and
Strg but also
Alt,
AltGr,
Win or even more (like
CapsLock) then it's essential to have every "meta" key on both sides. Otherwise you can't do some combinations comfortably. (FYI, I want to do sometimes
AltGr+Strg+Shift+(alphabetic characters) to highlight text wordwise)
Another thing that might be important is that they put the ESC key to Fn-F6, which is really slow to reach. I therefore started to use the ESC key of the Neo2 keyboard layout (see above).
Okay, then the layout is partly a matrix, partly staggered. The reason for this is maybe a compromise between traditional and ergonomic key positions. Personally I had no problems with that, but IMO the ErgoDox is layouted better in that aspect! In
an ealier Yogitype thread they discussed about that staggering.
Another thing relating Meta keys: the keyboard has several Fn-key combinations, mainly with F1-F12 keys. Personally I would prefer to use the key as a meta key (like Alt), but I guess this is not possible, as the key didn't cause an
xev event – like above.
This was a lot of text, I hope it helped some of you! If you have any ideas, let me know! Of course Thanks for reading!
