My Journey to Pain-Free Typing

As software developers, we type a lot. And we type very fast… This results in quite some keystrokes over the years. Sadly we don’t get younger. Due to that load most of us will feel some signs of wear and tear at some point in their career. For some it’s the neck, for others it’s a pain in the fingers.

When I reached that point a few years ago, I decided to do something against it. I still have many, many full days of typing ahead of me and if I keep going like that, the pain might get worse. I decided to learn more ergonomic typing!

Next time you are in the office, take a minute and observe a colleague while typing an email. You’ll notice that his hands and fingers are moving like crazy, stretching, wrenching and twisting over the keyboard. Even an amateur will see that this arrangement of keys seems to be not very effective. It seems like two keys are always on the exact opposite side of the keyboard making the hands and fingers travelling the maximum distance possible.

And why is that? Because this actually was a design goal of Christopher Sholes when he developed the QWERTY layout that we use on our keyboards today.

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