JIjiceo·Feb 20, 2024
A couple of years ago I had to undergo some serious wrist surgery and the recovery period was going to be several months as well. I was worried and didn't want to be out recovering without working, so I started looking into all sorts of alternative ways to type with my left hand. I looked into FrogPad, chorded keyboards, custom keyboards, etc.
In the end, I found a blog post about someone who just built a customized Karabiner-Elements bindings, where the keyboard layout is all the same for the "left-handed keys", but if you hold the spacebar the "right-handed keys" get mirrored to the left making it acessible to your left hand. Releasing the spacebar without a second key just inputs the spacebar as usual.
I customized that a little bit more to get some other keys in the places I wanted and set out to practice. Within a week I was typing a
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t 60wpm comfortably when measuring at Type Racer. I normally type at around 120wpm, so I was pretty happy with the result. In my IDE I also have been using VIM bindings since a decade, so moving around it wasn't any trouble. I adapted myself to use the mouse with my left hand which wasn't also too difficult.
It cost literally zero and I only needed to "re-learn" typing the mirrored letters, and even then, it wasn't as hard because it's just mirrored and your brain quickly adjusts. No need to learn a complete new layout.
Edit: Here's the Karabiner-Elements customized binding I used as a base: https://github.com/qubist/mirrorboard-mac?tab=readme-ov-file