Since putting together my ErgoMax a month back, I found myself feeling increasingly less keen to get back to productive stuff, which in my case is programming.
Yesterday I had a moment of clarity on the irritation that I couldn’t previously quite put my finger on — it was the steady hassle of having to fiddle with layer shifting and other mod keys such as shift or command, to type in even just a few lines of code.
How do all the programmers deal with having to constantly key in “, [] and {}, sometimes with cmd, ctrl etc keys held down, on boards without dedicated keys for them?
My preferred way is to have one symbol layer with all the symbols. It prevents having to constantly doing shift/unshift or switching layers (I personally call this "shift dancing") 😀
This is a nice clean layout! I appreciate that it isn’t trying to be tricky, but just lay everything out simply. The only part I’m not really getting is the equals sign relative to things like plus and times? Seems like typing equations, and things like += or *= kinda awkward? Beautiful all the same.
Good observation! I tried to maximise rolls on common symbol bigrams (=>:)({...})) and minimise single-finger bigrams. You're right that -= is kinda meh because it's an SFB but += and *= are kinda alright 😊