In January, I switched to using Kinesis Contoured keyboards. The main reason I started using them was that I was fearing RSI, and since switching typing has been much more comfortable and efficient.
Recently, though, I started taking advantage of another side of Kinesis. Kinesis sells foot pedals which plug into their keyboards; their USB Advantage Pro model comes with one for free, and you can buy more.
As far as I know, most people who use the Kinesis footswitch use it for a modifier key like SHIFT or CTRL, or as an enabler for the embedded numeric keypad, in order to save their hands from painful chording.
Not me. I have my left footswitch set up to type “k” and my right footswitch types a space.
Why? Well, I use Gmail, both for my personal account and for work. I generally read my incoming mail (especially in my work account, where I try to get every thread marked as read) by just clicking on the oldest unread thread, scrolling down in the thread with my spacebar, and going to the next newest thread with the “k” key. I don’t delete or archive, and use labels minimally. Anything that needs a response I either respond to instantly or start (hit “s”) and come back to it later.
So generally, when skimming my email, I’m just hitting “k” and “space”. And I can do it with my feet. That’s right: I can skim through my entire inbox while drinking coffee, or leaning back with my hands behind my head. And it’s as good as it can get for my wrists: complete abstinence.
(One little note: I’ve turned off key repeat for k and space in X Windows, so that I can just leave my foot down instead of quickly tapping, by inserting /usr/bin/xset -r 45; /usr/bin/xset -r 65 into my .xsession. I found those numbers by looking at the keycode field in xev.)
2 Comments
Very cool, but if you’d like to use your foot pedals for other things too you could add a way to switch them back and forth between other bindings. (Bind unused F# key to run a script that drives xmodmap.)
Another useful footpedal key is shift — as you’ve no doubt noticed, {}()=! are rather common characters in some languages and thus shift is one of the modifiers I use most.
Good call, Nick. I might look into that. Note, though, that I’m not reassigning the pedals with xmodmap: I’m using the Kinesis on-board remapping. I’m not quite sure how to programmatically change that.
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