Creating an optimized keyboard layout for the next generation of the Datahand

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2024-10-30 13:00:06

Ever seen this keyboard? This was called the Datahand, it was a radical new approach to keyboards that mostly only existed within a small community of RSI sufferers. It cost $2,000 in 1993, which is north of $4,000 today, so you really had to need this thing to justify the price. Even now there’s a small community that continues to use these.

For a long time after Datahand shut down production, there was no real replacement. Then Morgan Venable, alias Claussen, created Svalboard. It’s a modern take on the same formula, created by a consumer electronics professional whose career was saved by the Datahand decades ago. In fact, the creator of Datahand even uses a Svalboard nowadays!

I’m a keyboard nerd – a custom layout on the Chocofi has been my daily driver for the past couple years, which I can reach 150wpm on, but more importantly programming feels like a breeze. But there’s always room for improvement, and from everything I’ve seen about Svalboard, I think it’s the next step.

You can absolutely just migrate your existing layout to Svalboard almost 1 for 1, and get up and running right away. Reasonable people would do this. But there’s something wrong with my brain regarding keyboards. I need them to be optimized. I’m spending half my life on these things, which makes it impossible to justify anything that I know is suboptimal.

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