opposite-shift [Matthew's Journal]

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Over dinner last night, we talked a little about RSI. One thing that came up was that using the shift key and another key at the same time with the same hand (e.g. left-shift + q) puts your hand in a funny shape, and often makes RSI worse. People taught to touch-type don't do this, but others do.

It occurred to me that you could get some bit of X to only make opposite-shift work (at least for letters, sorting the punctuation characters out might be a bit harder), and this would fairly rapidly educate typists to DTRT. How hard would it be?

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There are 19 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

An interesting idea, but it would be a royal pain if you were mousing with one hand and hitting keyboard shortcuts with the other.

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Your keyboard shortcuts require Shift?

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Many of mine require Ctrl or Alt, certainly. Drift the mouse pointer around the screen machine-gunning terminal windows with ^D; alternate precisely aimed clicks in my editor window with Emacsish keybindings that do a given thing at each place I've put the cursor.

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I was only really planning on fettling shift, I think.

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Hmm. In that case, the other nasty case would be TYPING IN ALL CAPS, in which it would be a royal pain to keep changing shift key between letters!

(I suppose you could use caps lock, but generally I disable the caps lock key completely on any machine I use enough to make it worthwhile, because I hit it by accident far more often than I want to use it on purpose.)

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I REALLY HATE typing all in caps without using caps lock, as it ties my hands in knots. YMMV :)

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I've never had a problem with it, but then I'm one of these non-official-touch-typists whose typing style evolved to match the requirements made on it. I can type fine with one or several fingers out of action due to injury or holding food or whatever (except for one or two that I really depend on), so keeping my left little finger on Shift doesn't present a problem for me at all. Certainly rather that than have a caps lock key, though I suppose it might be different if my usage patterns required me to type in all-caps lots of the time.

Of course, I now recall that in my BBC-using days I typically left Caps Lock on all the time in its overridable mode, and held down shift when I wanted to type in lower case :-)

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ITYM 'fettering'.

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Shortcuts for slightly less common things often use shift in conjunction with other modifier keys.

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Paint Shop Pro (on Windows) use shift-foo keyboard shortcuts. IIRC shift-S for reSize (or it could be shift-R, I don't have it on my work box).

Note to self: must remember the f in shift.

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shift-ctrl-S is pretty useful when editing multiple source files.

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M-%, M-!, M-|, etc.

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I use a toggling shift - I hit the shift, and then the next key I hit is shifted, then back to normal. I got this trick from my brother's computer setup, which is that way as he's physically incapable of pressing two keys at once.

For me, it's the use of Alt/Meta modifier keys that will cause RSI, as I use Emacs, and Emacs bindings, for absolutely everything. Although I do use both left and right Alt/Meta keys, and I try to avoid stretching to two keys with one hand. After 20 odd years of practice, it now sort-of works...

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Alt/Meta/Shift foot pedals are the only answer for those addicted to Emacs.

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I've though about it, although I suspect I don't have the necessary coordination.

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if you ever do it, remember that which keys are on the left/right can depend on the keyboard (like this 'b' on the left side of mine [and probably yours])

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That's WEIRD - I have just tested myself and discovered that I, a touch-typist have adopted the same-hand-shift-key letter habit for letters close to the shift key but for those keys in the centre of the keyboard and therefore further from the shift key, I still have the original typing method.

That's not good.

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I think that you'd need to make left and right shift separate modifiers, and then split the letters into two separate modification planes. Certainly ought to be possible for English layouts.

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What do people taught to touch type get taught to do? (Oh, I suppose, use the other shift key).

Anyway, this IS something I do, and you are right it probably doesn't help the issue with my shoulder. Maybe it is even the cause! Which is why when it plays up I write in lowercase only when live chatting etc.

'Sticky keys' works well for me though, which reminds me I need to set them up again!

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Matthew's Journal

opposite-shift

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