Re: special keyboard, ctrl below spacebar

[Joe Fineman]

Malte Spiess <i1tnews@arcor.de> writes:

> "Florian Kaufmann" <sensorflo@gmail.com> writes:

>> Since I moved Ctrl to Caps Lock on my 'US windows' keyboard, I am
>> wondering how I still could improve accessibility to modifier keys
>> as ctrl, meta, shift (, hyper, super). I thought it would be great
>> to have 2 of these left and right to the middle below the space
>> bar. With the left pinkie and the two thumbs the modifiers would be
>> reachable very easy, and while pressing any of these modifiers you
>> still could reach easily almost any other key with the other
>> fingers. A similar idea would also be to make the space bar much
>> shorter, and place the two new keys at the side of the now shorter
>> space bar. The new keys would be reachable more easily than alt is
>> now beside the long space bar. Now I wonder if such keyboards
>> already exist, or if somebody knows how I could alter an existing
>> keyboard and make the two additional keys myself. I googled a bit,
>> but didn't found anything. Any ideas?
>
> I use a Contoured keyboard by Kinesis:
> http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/

So do I.  It puts Ctrl & Alt handy to the thumbs, and they are next to
each other, so you can even do Ctrl-Alt with one thumb.  The space key
is no longer a bar, but is where the right thumb lives.

However, it is absurdly expensive -- at a guess, because it is
marketed as a remedy for carpal tunnel syndrome, so it gets paid for
largely out of insurance.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  If you can't get the blues off your mind, get your mind off  :||
||:  the blues.                                                   :||