So I joined the mechanical keyboard tribe. Long story short, after 5 months working remotely bent over my laptop at my kitchen table, I said enough, bought a desk, a monitor and while I was at it, wanted to also switch to a mechanical keyboard and graduate from the flat and shorter course of the laptop keyboards I had been using for the last 10+ years (including most of my learning how to code and countless reports written for my MBA).

For the 2 people actually intersted, I went for the Ergodox DX after reading quite a lot of good reviews on Twitter. And the split design made me realised how much muscle memory was important in typing. That is especially true because this keyboard was my first ever using the US layout out of the box.

And that’s an important point actually. I did learn to type many many years ago. More than many people I know. The main reason for that is that my mother worked as a typist for many years and I got my introduction to computers this way. I was always impressed by the speed at which she was typing and wanted to learn this way. And with more and more reports typed (as opposed to hand-written) this became a huge advantage for me during university. Except everything was based on the French layout.

Where you know the usually QWERTY alignment, think AZERTY, plus a lot of accentuated characters and special characters where you wouldn’t expect them. And then I switched to a serie of Japanese layout keyboards which made me relearn a brand new layout though not with the samefluency as the French one. That was around that time that I reverted to 6-fingers typing.

So with a new keyboard forcing me to correct how I place my fingers (no more reaching for the B key with my right finger, the B key is way too far away), I just decided to learn to type, again, correctly this time. I have been using [Typing Club] (http://typingclub.com) for the past three weeks, adjusting the layout a few times over the weekedn and sticking to it for at least a week.

Progress are slow. Having to search for the differnt keys, or rather, memorizing the key location is tricky so far. With keys with a longer course than anything on my previous keyboards, the few weeks was also physically tiring and my forearms were killing me for the first week. I have now gone beyond that initial pain phase an now, only my fingers hurt after tyoing for 1 hour or more.

Next steps is to get more confortable coding using this keyboard. I am still unconfortable usiing the special characters keys as a whole and coding involve so many of them… But given how much time I spend typing (mostly emails and PowerPoints sadly) every day, this can only be a good investment in the future.

Yes, that was another useless post, because my current work is so mentally taxing I have not been able to concentrate on learning (or even read) for the last 4 months.