So yesterday I received my preonic in the mail and got it all set up. When I purchased the board I was expecting to have a large adjustment period over the course of a week to get adjusted to the different key spacing. But it is only the next day and I am within 10% of my WPM on a regular board already. So basically I was wanting to hear other peoples experiences of adjusting to ortholinear or alternate layouts in general.
I assume the common denominator in my adjustment would be qwerty. I would assume learning colemak or something would take much longer to get accustomed to. Right now the main thing i have issues with is hitting x and c consistently as I have now learned that I have been using my left index to hit those keys on regular spacing which is causing issues when on ortholinear since they are closer to the left of the board than they were on staggered.
When I switched to ortho, the biggest problem for me was adjusting my wrists. I realized that I held my left wrist at a little bit of an angle relative to the bottom edge of the keyboard to compensate for row stagger. Once I corrected this, my accuracy went much higher and then it was a matter of getting used to a couple problem keys — C and N in my case.
With about a week of typing practice, I was back up to pretty much my normal speed and accuracy again
In my experience ortho is actually even easier than staggered, though as with you, I still have to get rid of some bad habits — in my case it’s hitting B with the right hand.
I did notice, though, that after a while of using ortho, going back to staggered is painful.
It’s really nice to have a split ortho for that reason. I found my self twisting my wrist in an unhealthy manner on my Planck. So I got a Zygomorph to feel more comfortable.
Another thing with ortho, it was easier for me to use layers. Something about the grid pattern makes it easier to remember.
My main machine is a laptop, and while I do use it mostly at my desk, I still use its keyboard when I take it out of the office. So I can switch between my normal split ortho setup and it all right now, but I type slightly better with my split ortho.
The real shame is that my trusty HHKB Pro 2 hasn’t seen the light of day since I put together my split ortho.
I had a similar experience when I switched to ortho. I can’t say that going back to staggered was painful because I don’t think I have ever switched back to staggered for any length of time to tell.
But it definitely fixed that issue that I had hitting the ‘B’ key and the various issues with the num row like hitting the 7 number. Bottom line, ortho was easier for me to adapt and to this day I don’t have an issue hitting one the keys like ‘B’ and ‘K’ that are awkward to hit on staggered. And gaming on ortho makes it easy to understand why most game pads are ortho.
