I've blogged before about my tendency to use the mouse over the keyboard. Currently I have a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I liked my old Microsoft Natural Multimedia Keyboard, but the keys were sticking and the light grey colored plastic was seriously discolored and nasty looking (my sweat is great at discoloring things). My wife didn't like the ergonomic split keyboard of the 4000 I got for home, so I took it with me when I started my new job.

Comparison

Pros

• 5 customizable buttons designed for launching apps
• standard layout of the insert/delete, home/end, pgup/pgdn buttons
• black coloring looks nice and won't show sweat residue
• back/forward buttons (see below) and zoom in/out toggle
• wrist pad feels really nice
  

Cons

• only media buttons - play/pause
• volume up/down/mute controls windows, not media player
• wrist pad is already staining where my wrists rest
• zoom in/out button not customizable
• I don't like how pressing keys feels - not enough tactile feedback
  

Back / Forward

I never really liked the back and forward buttons that tend to end up on mice, and having them on the keyboard is even more useless. When I'm surfing, I'm actively using my mouse, so I don't mind clicking back/forward in my browser's toolbar. I end up mapping the mouse buttons to other things. I also don't surf while at work, so I found a practical re-mapping for these buttons.

Visual Studio shortcuts

LukeH's recent post about the F12 button reminded me of a custom configuration I have set up. The post mentioned the navigate back/forward functionality in Visual Studio. I configured my keyboard's back/forward buttons to the these navigation keystrokes so I can easily move around in code without moving my hand to the mouse. I've found this configuration very useful.

I've actually been trying to learn more keyboard shortcuts lately, and set my own. I've downloaded Roy Osherove's Keyboard Jedi application, but I'm too much of a wimp to turn on the no-mouse feature.

Where's the mouse?

My motivation behind using more keyboard shortcuts is because I moved my keyboard to a keyboard tray that doesn't have any room for the mouse. I was using my mouse on the desktop, but my shoulder really started hurting from having my right arm extended so often. Also, my wrist was resting on the edge of the desk which was sometimes cutting off circulation.

My solution was to get a trackball to fit in the 3.5 inches of space available on the keyboard tray. I tried the Logitech Cordless TrackMan Programmable Optical Mouse, but the thumb buttons were too close to the keyboard and I just couldn't get used to using my fingers to navigate and click. I now use the Logitech Trackman Wheel Scroll Optical Mouse trackball and I'm amazed how quickly I adapted to using it. (why can't Logitech come up with product names that don't all look the same?)

My navigation speed is still a lot slower than with a regular mouse, and when it's getting close to lunch time I sometimes find my thumb starting twitching making accuracy very difficult, so I still have my regular mouse attached. This is also useful when a co-worker stops by and wants to take over to show me something.

It's funny how many people are surprised that you can have multiple I/O devices of the same type attached, but it really doesn't cause a problem unless the configuration applications conflict. Reminds me of a year ago when I was working on virtual keyboard functionality and had three keyboards, all different languages, attached at once in order to do unit testing.

Unfortunately, the trackball doesn't have any thumb buttons, but I did remap the middle click to bring up my Clipboard Recorder floating window, which is occasionally useful.

Labels: devices