kb42 - My personal split keyboard

As I began to get more and more involved with programming and spending a considerable amount of time typing, I found myself wanting to get faster. I didn't just want to get faster at typing, though, I wanted to get faster at editing. In my ECE 1400 - Fundamentals of Engineering Computing course I was required to use Vim for all of my text editing while in class. At the beginning of the semester it felt like a lot to learn at once. This was my first exposure to the C programming language, the CLI and ssh, git repositories (which we hosted ourselves with a server on campus), and now we had to stumble our way through Vim whenever we were editing files.

It all felt really slow. I had Visual Studio Code installed on my laptop and what little text editing I did at the time felt very comfortable with a full-fledged GUI and the ability to use a mouse. But, as the semester went on I began to feel a little more comfortable with the Vim experience. I even installed the Vim plugin in VS Code because I felt faster jumping around with H, J, K, and L instead of moving my wrist to the arrow keys. As my battles with the syntax of Python and C decreased, I found myself thinking faster than I was able to type my ideas into the program, and I wanted to become even faster.

While reading online about other people's experiences with Vim and improving their text editing speed, many people suggested remapping the Caps Lock key to the escape key so that you didn't have to remove your wrist as much to exit INSERT mode. I thought that was a great idea, but I found it incredibly difficult to reprogram the cheap mechanical keyboard I found on Facebook Marketplace. I struggled with AutoHotkey scripts and knew that I was just trying to hack a solution together rather than solve it the right way. The right way would be to buy a new keyboard that has programmable keys.

I didn't mind the idea of buying a new keyboard, and customizable keys would allow me to try other new things too, such as different keyboard layouts (I was interested in Colemak at the time). The thing that I did mind, however, was the price of such a mechanical keyboard. As a college student I don't want to drop several hundred dollars on an input device, but I still wanted to experience the world of customizable keyboards.

I quickly found myself deep in the rabbit hole of custom mechanical keyboard YouTube. Of course I started getting lots of ads for the Kinesis Advantage360.

To be continued...