Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

91•Townley•2d ago

A relative of mine recently suffered a serious injury to their dominant (right) arm, which will have a long recovery period (likely several months). Ideally finger movement will be restored sooner, but even if so it might not be comfortable to keep the injured arm in an ergonomic typing position.

So I wanted to prepare some options for one-handed typing that they can review. At first glance, it looks like solutions fall into one of three categories:

- Trainings on how to effectively use a keyboard with one hand

- Keyboard remappings on existing hardware to use alternative key layouts that favor the keys on the left side

- Specialty keyboards that are intended to be used with one hand. Some of these seem promising but also shockingly expensive.

Any thoughts on what solutions you've seen work / you might pursue in a similar situation?

Comments

janice1999•2d ago

Have you considered voice dictation and control? There are good commercial solutions and even some free ones (like https://talonvoice.com/ - edit: not open source but has lots of community plugins). I used it for a while when I was recovering from hand problems. I was surprised how easy it was to learn. It helped a lot for tasks like navigating windows, writing emails etc. There are even voice coding applications now (https://www.cursorless.org/).

jonah-archive•2d ago

I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html

ggerules•1d ago

I've also used an early version of the twiddler. It is a very nice keyboard with mouse integration. It seems they have upgraded the product.

https://www.mytwiddler.com/

neilv•1d ago

Thirded on Twiddler. I didn't use it myself, but I worked with some people who were very productive with it. One was even said to have written their dissertation laying down, with a Twiddler and a HUD.

Separate from that, when I've temporarily injured one hand/arm or the other, typing on a QWERTY keyboard wasn't that slow for me. Especially if I typed all-lowercase. Though my normal typing style has two hands moving around the keyboard a bit; I don't know whether traditional home-row typists would fine one-handed more difficult.

(Just be careful when Web searching about this topic at work, since it's bumping into an old euphemism joke on Reddit.)

sillystuff•1d ago

I'll second the steep learning curve for the twiddler. I never got up to a typing speed on it that was not horribly, frustratingly, slow. But, I only needed it for a couple months.

Like OP's relative, I also could not use my dominant arm, nor have my arm in a position that would allow typing one handed on a regular keyboard. The twiddler was the only commercially available option that I was able to find that would allow me to type in this state. So, another recommendation of twiddler, but with the caveat that the original had several warts, and while they appear to be redesigned, they may still suffer from some of them.

The velcro strap to hold it to the hand, combined with the shape of the keyboard, allowed it to shift position while typing making it harder to use. Photos of the current models show they have a different shape now. Maybe this is less of a problem now? They are also wireless now, so there isn't a wire constantly pulling it out of position whenever you move.

The keyboard markings rubbed off completely after only a few weeks of use on my OG twiddler. Hopefully they have worked that manufacturing issue out for the current models.

kace91•2d ago

Any specifics on the kind of typing they need?

If it’s human text (as opposed to code), one handed swipe style typing on a smartphone can get really fluid, and it’s relatively easy to get for someone who is a touch typer. I’d check on ways to use that as computer input if needed.

AstroBen•2d ago

My first thought would be to have them look into voice dictation instead of relying only on one hand. That would be much faster than typing

lburton•2d ago

This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmware keyboard (I was also already typing on a split keyboard so that might be part of the reason it was fairly easy to adjust). See https://docs.qmk.fm/features/swap_hands#swap-hands-action

bryanlarsen•2d ago

Yes, I was just going to make this suggestion. If it's a temporary problem, you probably don't want a solution that requires extensive retraining to use. A mirrored keyboard takes advantage of existing brain wiring.

autohotkey layout: https://github.com/hanmindev/mirrorboard

xkb layout: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

jfengel•1d ago

In a quick experiment, I found that utterly baffling. On zero practice, it was much faster for me to type with just my left hand. (Though it requires me to keep looking at the keyboard, because I'm leaving the home position.)

fouronnes3•1d ago

I am low key thinking about trying this without any disability, as a way of always keeping the right hand on the mouse.

barbazoo•1d ago

Foot pedal maybe? Or maybe a dedicated mouse button.

bravesoul2•1d ago

I like the idea. Don't you love those words like "creed" or "scare" that can be typed with one hand!

Valodim•1d ago

Stewardess ;)

komali2•1d ago

Does your usual computer activity require a lot of mouse work? Ten years ago I went down this path when my coworker caught me adding bindings to my mouse buttons. He sat me down at his machine and showed me vim wasn't just an old fart text editor and that the bindings can be used in other editors.

Ofc if you're not doing text based work this wouldn't apply.

ahonhn•1d ago

I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(

faizshah•1d ago

I had the same experience, my typing speed with two hands is 90-120 but with one hand i can still get 50-70. The hard part is punctuation but with AI these days you could try just prompting and let the AI deal with syntax for you.

bravesoul2•1d ago

That's a fast speed. I practice to get to 60 then said well, that's good enough!

haiku2077•1d ago

Right, you could run your text through an LLM that adds punctuation and then fix up the result manually. Would probably save time + fatigue

arjvik•1d ago

Randall Munroe talks about exactly this:

https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

idahoduncan•1d ago

I have this set up using kmonad[1], and the following config. Many punctation marks are obviously missing, but I'm sure they could be added with a little thought. The mirrored layout is toggled by holding the space key.

    (defalias
      lhs (tap-next-release spc (layer-toggle ytrewq)))
    
    (deflayer ytrewq
      _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           bspc 0    9    8    7    6    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           _    p    o    i    u    y    _    _    _    _    _    _    _         _
           ret  ;    l    k    j    h    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _    _
           lsft /    .    ,    m    n    _    _    _    _    _    _         _    _
      _    _    _    _              _              _    _              _    _    _)

1. https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad

behnamoh•1d ago

kmonad:

    written in Haskell
    config in Lisp

Best of both worlds!

idahoduncan•1d ago

It's also apparently cross-platform. Great project!

arccy•2d ago

on a phone: swipe / glide typing only requires 1 finger. good enough for general text.

colgandev•2d ago

First of all, condolences to your friend and cool of you to look into this.

Back in the day I switched to Dvorak and came across the "one handed Dvorak layout. This may be what you are referring to. I haven't tried it much but those layouts could be a temporary solution. I found Qwerty to be a lot easier to type one handed straight up because Dvorak tries to alternate hands between keys.

I recently discovered Talon, an open source app for voice control of basically everything on a machine that requires no typing at all. I saw some people are using it even if they can use their hands, as a power tool. It appears to be fully Python scriptable and also gives you some nice speech to text abilities too.

It allows you to specify a bunch of keywords for typing symbols and it looks like some people can do full coding quite quickly.

Perhaps this injury could be an opportunity to try something like this and become more powerful than before?

Best of luck and recovery to your friend.

https://talonvoice.com/

janice1999•2d ago

Talon is not open source as far as I know. It's freeware with Patreon early access and support. The community plugins cover a wide range of applications and are easy to modify. I also found their Slack good for discussing accessibility options like gaze tracking. It looks like development has slowed significantly but the developer recently rewrote the core in Rust.

colgandev•2d ago

Ah, that's my mistake, thanks!

jdknezek•2d ago

I had a family member who broke a finger on their prominent hand and used the left-handed Dvorak layout while it healed, getting up to about 40 WPM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout#One-han...

hinkley•1d ago

Dvorak left and right have the distinction of being available out of the box on most successful operating systems.

Advice from when I learned Dvorak: post a picture of the keyboard layout at monitor height (I put it on my background) so you can figure out where the characters are without looking down.

DonHopkins•2d ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38400368

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: AI is currently just glorified compression

I love David MacKay's brilliant work on the Dasher text input system, which draws deeply from his work on information theory -- imagine Dasher integrated with an IDE and code search and Copilot and language model!

"Writing is navigating in the library of all possible books." -David MacKay

We just allocate more shelf space to the more probable letters.

Why isn't Dasher built into every operating system and mobile phone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)

https://dasher.acecentre.net/about/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105728

DonHopkins on May 18, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...

Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc

Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and uses Dasher and a Headmouse to program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ

Another one of her demonstrating Dasher:

Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvsSrClBwPM

Here’s a more recent presentation about it, that tells all about the latest open source release of Dasher 5:

Dasher - CSUN 2016 - Ada Majorek and Raquel Romano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFlkM_e-sDg

Here's the github repo:

Dasher Version 4.11

https://github.com/GNOME/dasher

>Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still allowing high rates of text entry.

Ada referred me to this mind bending prototype:

D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4

>( http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher ) - a really neat way to "dive" through a menu hierarchy/, or through recursively nested options (to build words, letter by letter, swiftly). D@sher takes Dasher, and gives it a twist, making slightly better use of screen revenue.

>It also "learns" your typical useage, making more frequently selected options larger than sibling options. This makes it faster to use, each time you use it.

>More information here: http://beznesstime.blogspot.com and here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=960

Dasher is even a viable way to input text in VR, just by pointing your head, without a special input device!

Text Input with Oculus Rift:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFQgluUwV2U

>As part of VR development environment I'm currently writing ( https://github.com/xanxys/construct ), I've implemented dasher ( http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher ) to input text.

One important property of Dasher is that you can pre-train it on a corpus of typical text, and dynamically train it while you use it. It learns the patterns of letters and words you use often, and those become bigger and bigger targets that string together so you can select them even more quickly!

Ada Majorek has it configured to toggle between English and her native language so she can switch between writing email to her family abroad and co-workers at google.

Now think of what you could do with a version of dasher integrated with a programmer's IDE, that knew the syntax of the programming language you're using, as well as the names of all the variables and functions in scope, plus how often they're used!

I have a long term pie in the sky “grand plan” about developing a JavaScript based programmable accessibility system I call “aQuery”, like “jQuery” for accessibility. It would be a great way to deeply integrate Dasher with different input devices and applications across platforms, and make them accessible to people with limited motion, as well as users of VR and AR and mobile devices.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins...

Here’s some discussion on hacker news, to which I contributed some comments about Dasher:

A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot (lowendmac.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306377

novosel•1d ago

Excuse me, maybe I am not getting it, why is this downvoted?

I came here to suggest Dasher to OP also.

MyPasswordSucks•1d ago

Because it's a lengthy stream of barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea when a simple "Dasher might be a great option! I don't have time to summarize why I think it would be great, but here are some links to previous HN threads where it's been discussed <link> <link> <link>, and it comes recommended by <Firstname McLastname>, a <JobTitle> at <Company> - here's a couple 45-minute Youtubes to not-watch <link> <link>" would do much better.

DonHopkins•1d ago

You're proving exactly why I posted what I did. Nobody else has the time to watch a couple of 45 minute videos (several hours actually), so I took the time to do that myself (several more videos about Dasher than those, in fact), and summarize them for you.

I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.

https://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/

There are many interesting points and ideas I've tried to gather together and summarize, and I think Dasher is an important, underrated, not widely known piece of work, that can deeply improve many people's lives, which more people should know about.

Not just people with a wide range of disabilities, but fully abled people without free time on their hands who frequently need to input lots of text quickly. That's why accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion are so important: they help everyone.

Dasher a wonderful open source project to contribute to, and a solid foundation that needs to be brought up-to-date and re-implement it in terms of modern LLMs, AI assisted IDEs like Cursor, mobile, and VR/AR user interfaces.

I don't have time to do all of that myself, but I hope to save other people time and effort by writing about it, and I hope to inspire students, researchers, software developers, hackers, and therapists who do have the time, interest, friends, loved ones, patients, and customers who could benefit from it.

I'm sorry to hear about your disabilities of poor reading comprehension and trouble parsing text, and I'm envious that you have so much free time and nothing better to do, that you can take time to complain about your impatience with and intolerance of my writing. But it would have been easier, more efficient, and less stressful for you to simply ignore things you're not interested in rather than unconstructively whining with off-topic posts that benefit nobody. Obviously you don't appreciate how lucky you are to be able to type such a useless post so easily. I'm not even asking you to be empathic, or give a shit about anyone but yourself: if you're lucky enough to live long enough, you'll need accessibility tools like Dasher too.

If you'd like to redeem yourself by writing a more useful constructive response to my post, then go right ahead, read my previous posts, watch all the videos, read all the papers and source code yourself, have some email discussions with other people using and working on Dasher, and then try to write a better summary, because your abstract summary above has absolutely no useful information, and isn't relevant to the discussion -- just a waste of your time and everyone else's.

Or you could even take the trivial effort to paste my write-up into ChatGPT and post a summary, but that would be much lower quality and less enlightening than actually watching the videos and reading the articles and source code I cited yourself, but still better and more interesting than your current bitter off-topic "contribution" to the discussion.

If it makes you feel better, I've written every word of this post personally just for you, MyPasswordSucks. No copying or pasting whatsoever (except the email at the end, with updated links to archive.org since my web site is offline, and I reformatted the transcript of Ada's video). Are you satisfied? Is that the attention you crave? Are my syntax and semantics comprehensible to you now? In return, what do you have to contribute to this discussion yourself, besides whining and criticizing form instead of substance?

At least aaron695's rightfully flagged dead sibling comment unsuccessfully and incoherently attempted to criticize dasher itself, not just the messenger, so it was at least more on topic than you post. I hope you can do better.

Here's the email I sent and the response that Ada Majorek wrote to me, using Dasher and headmouse. Since she was so swamped with work at Google, and it took her so much time and effort, even with Dasher, for her to reply to my email because she has ALS, I cherish her helpful reply, and I am glad you reminded me to share it, even if it annoys you to read so much thoughtful meticulously written text that she took the precious time out of her challenging life to write to me:

----

Hello!

I’ve been a huge fan of Dasher for years!

I'm sad to hear that David MacKay passed away. I knew of his work on Dasher, but am just discovering his great work on global warming.

I’m happy to discover how Ada Majorek is carrying on his work, and that Dasher version 5 has been released!

I developed and evaluated pie menus in the late 80’s and have used them in various games and applications, and more recently I’ve been doing mobile and VR programming with Unity3D.

I’m interested in helping develop versions of Dasher on other platforms, especially Unity, and specifically for head mounted displays.

Is anyone else working on that, with whom I could collaborate?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins...

I’d be delighted to discuss Dasher and aQuery with anyone who’s interested!

Here’s some discussion on hacker news, to which I contributed some comments about Dasher:

A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot (lowendmac.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306377

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12310029

-Don

----

Hi Don,

I will write more soon. I was swamped with work last week.

First, I am very happy to see your interest in Dasher. I don't have enough time to research another platform. I will be happy to give you walk through the code, and you can decide, if adding Unity is feasible. Is it possible to interface with C++ code on Uniy? There is Dasher Core. It is platform independent. And "all" you need to do is to extend several classes.

Implementing it in Java Script is an interesting idea. You are second person suggesting it. Again, I will not have time to do it. But would gladly answer any questions.

When you wrote about radial menus, I immediately thought of this prototype. Have you seen it before?

D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4

I better send half of the email now, than full email never ;-)

Written with Dasher and Headmouse.

:-) Ada

----

Thank you for your quick reply — I’m delighted to hear from you!

Yes, it’s possible to interface native C++ code with Unity.

It would also be possible to translate the C++ code to C#, which is a similar language (just cleaner and more modern).

It’s also possible to compile C++ into JavaScript, but that makes it considerably harder to integrate with normal JavaScript code, so it might also be worth considering translating the C++ code to JavaScript by hand, to make it more efficient and better integrated with the browser.

That adaptive hierarchical radial menu is wonderful! Thank you for linking me to that. I’ll contact the author and brainstorm ideas!

That reminds me of a weird experiment I tried years ago: Here is a “precision pie menu” that I made for the NeWS window system, which lets you precisely select an angle by poking out of the circle and precisely dialing in an exact number with a flexible floppy line. I’ve never used it for anything practical, but it was a fun experiment!

Precision Pie Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c

Experiments like that are useful vehicles for exploring possibilities and generating new ideas, even if they aren’t directly useful themselves. You just can’t get very far by doing though experiments alone — you need to play with a working prototype and actually feel how it works, in order to decide how to improve it or design something different.

It’s so cool you’re using Dasher and a Headmouse for everyday work, and that gives you so much experience and insight into how to use it best and make it better.

So please don’t hesitate to send me half emails and half baked ideas, even if you don’t have the time to finish them!

-Don

----

Ada Majorek on Dasher:

[I reformatted her inspiring transcript, for people who don't have time to watch the three minute video, although it's well worth it to see how Dasher works.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ

ALS robbed me from ability to speak and ability to use computer keyboard.

Thanks to Dasher I am still able to communicate at reasonable speed.

Hi, my name is Ada. I want to talk about why I like Dasher. Since my ALS diagnosis in 2013 I tried countless number of alternative text entry and speech generation methods.

So far Dasher is the fastest and least tiring.

Dasher supports multiple languages. Very important for me, since I switch between English and Polish many times per day.

I really like geeky origin of Dasher.

It started as a visualization of arithmetic coding algorithm.

Unfortunately at the time Dasher was not actively maintained. I was a software engineer in desperate need for a fast alternative communication tool.

Dasher was an open-source project. I decided to start coding. With help of my friends and support of Google, we added many features making Dasher even better suited for alternative means of communication.

And here we are today after almost 6 years of silence we are releasing a new version of Dasher: Dasher 5.00.

If you know people with motor impairments or therapists, please let them know. They will like new features we have added. If you know programming, consider contributing to this very valuable project.

And last but not least, if you worked on Dasher in the past, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.

DonHopkins•1d ago

Even though the parent comment is useless and off-topic, I am vouching and unflagging it, so my response is visible. Please give MyPasswordSucks a chance to respond and attempt to redeem himself by trying to post something useful and interesting instead of whining. (Although I don't expect he's capable of doing that, so I feel sorry for him, but he deserves a chance to try to do better, or prove he can't by not responding.)

̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.

Trump mocks reporter with disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA

>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports

Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:

Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:

DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.

Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.

DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.

novosel•22h ago

I agree, Dasher is a beautiful piece of software design.

I am ok with the long-form reply. We are all sentient, one can scan for the information or insights that are valuable to him/her. On the other hand, I dislike when information is withheld from me.

I was researching different input methods, and stumbled upon Dasher. What I like the most is:

  - the fact that I can write with one hand (like with a fountain pen, remember those?)

  - right edge of the interface is literally The Library of Babel of J. L. Borges

DonHopkins•5m ago

What's magnificent about Dasher is that it works with so many modalities, like eye tracking, suck tube, pressing a single button and waiting, etc. It's able to extract the maximum number of bits of text per minute from the minimum amount of bits of input per minute, harnessing every input device to its fullest potential.

It also seamlessly supports multiple languages, it can be pre-trained on examples of what you write so it adapts to your vocabulary and gives your favorite words more shelf space on the Library of Babel, and you can include symbols and functions too. You could even have an "emoji" branch where you spell out the :smile: codes, constraint to just the defined codes so it's easier to select them (and see the growing emojis as you get near to spelling them out all the way).

It drives me nuts how we blindly accept these ancient, kludgy input methods -- QWERTY is the biggest offender, but let’s not forget those shiny swipe keyboards that think gliding your thumb over letters is somehow “intuitive,” or the garbled cell-phone autocomplete systems that keep mangling your sentences until they’re barely recognizable.

Dasher is in a league of its own. Instead of shoving you into a historically fixed grid of scrambled letters, or forcing you to hunt and peck through a list of predicted but unpredictable words, Dasher treats writing as a continuous journey through a probability landscape! You don’t tap tiny squares or hope the AI guesses what you meant, you literally “dive” into the next letter or word that’s statistically most likely. Maximum text output for minimum physical effort, without any of the guesswork or awkward ergonomics baked into QWERTY, swipe tricks, or lame psychotic autocomplete engines.

pavel_lishin•2d ago

This was ... about 20 years ago, and I don't even remember why I wanted to do this, but I found some software that let me remap the keyboard somehow - so I picked a key (probably caps lock?) that would "mirror" the standard QWERTY layout.

F would become J; S would become L, etc.

I was able to have a fairly decent input speed.

I wish I remembered why I did this. I think I had some tedious task that I couldn't figure out how to automate, that required me to have one hand on the mouse[1] most of the time, and swapping between keyboard and mouse all the time got tedious enough that I invested the time.

[1] Yes, the mouse. :)

edit: Ah, someone already made the same suggestion elsewhere here! I'm glad it's a popular choice.

system2•2d ago

I am very interested in keyboard and built some like dactyl manuform. I watched this one on youtube and was impressed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNU5rRbhzTU

Also if you go down the youtube rabbit hole you will find many interesting 1 hand layouts.

add-sub-mul-div•2d ago

I've used Talon for voice and AutoHotKey for mapping the caps lock key as a mouse click. But beware, suddenly using the non dominant side much more to compensate can cause issues. I probably needed some proactive physical therapy or strengthening on the non injured side.

rowla•2d ago

One-handed typer here – well, one hand and one finger, and it’s been like this for all my life. Your friend may want to consider text macro tools such as Keyboard Maestro for macOS. There are many others, but KM will also launch apps and do other magic for me just by typing two or three letters. Create a list of frequently used words or segments, define a generic expansion key (in my case #) that doesn’t require a modifier. I have more than 1000 of these macros, and it really helps with all those long words in my native German. Dictation may also help, although I find that it leads my thoughts in different directions when I see words appear on the screen as I speak.

donatj•1d ago

My dad has the same situation, one arm and one finger on said arm - the beefiest pinky you've ever seen.

He does most of his typing these days with voice-to-text on his Android phone, and he's pretty adept with it. Otherwise he gets by pretty well with a standard Apple keyboard. He's not winning any speed awards but he does alright.

yehoshuapw•1d ago

for/from a phone: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

jankins•1d ago

When I broke my collarbone on my dominant arm I learned Dvorak left-handed layout a QMK keyboard. I configured some layers to make all the symbols needed for programming easy to access, and hold-space-for-shift. I learned the layout using Epistory, a typing game. There’s several similar games now that look helpful. It was slower but workable.

manish_gill•1d ago

Co-incidentally, saw this video on Microsoft's VSCode Youtube channel yesterday - the Engineer in question was born without a right hand and shows her workflow with accessibility tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUPqKm5wVhw

Hope this helps your relative. Good luck.

aguynamedben•1d ago

Along with figuring out the typing, don't underestimate how powerful voice transcription has become with apps like superwhisper https://superwhisper.com/

daviddisco•1d ago

Your friend might also consider No Handed Typing i.e. speech based typing. The tools for this have really progressed in recent times. I have a friend who codes full time without using his hands. He uses https://talonvoice.com/ but I'm sure there are other tools as well.

deng•1d ago

Specialty keyboards like the TiPY are indeed very expensive, here in the EU it's a thousand (!) Euros:

https://tipykeyboard.com/en/produkt/tipy-keyboard-black-en

However, if your relative is employed and needs to type for the job, then there's a good chance the employer will pay for it if it means they can work more efficiently during these months. Another option, which however is much less likely to succeed and will probably take much longer, is to try to get this through health insurance.

wrp•1d ago

I once needed to seriously investigate a setup for one-handed typing. My conclusion at the time was that after a learning period, one-hand typing on a regular keyboard was just as productive as using a special keyboard, and had the advantage of not needing special facilities. I think the only special feature needed was the addition of a "sticky" key facility.

bearded_comrade•1d ago

I came across this on Instagram today:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKcV8_cPHll/

They made a one handed keyboard for someone who can't use their right hand. They also open sourced it on github:

https://github.com/htx-studio/One-Handed-Keyboard

kingnothing•1d ago

I had a surgery once upon a time on my non-dominant arm which left me in a one-handed typing state for a couple of months. I simply used one hand on a full size keyboard. My typing speed went through the floor, but it was doable. I doubt I would invest the time, effort, and expense to learn dedicated hardware if I had to go through it again. I definitely would explore those options if I had permanent loss of the hand, though.

bshacklett•1d ago

Perhaps I missed it, but I’m amazed I didn’t see any mention of Maltron here:

https://www.maltron.com/store/p19/Maltron_Single_Hand_Keyboa...

They’re expensive, and the other options mentioned may be better, but I feel like they should be included for completeness’ sake at the very least.

xupybd•1d ago

That was my first thought. If you have an injury like this the Maltron's are built for disability.

troll_v_bridge•1d ago

Maltron is OG in the ergo keyboard space as well. Believe they inspired Kinesis, as I think Maltron may have been the first to use the well design.

saulrh•1d ago

I know someone who uses a Twiddler full-time, and I used mine for about a month when I broke my dominant hand about a decade ago. Works very well if your hand is the right size for it.

I have a tap strap, but I use it mostly as a remote control for my TV, not as a primary input device. It probably works, but I'm not good enough with it to have the kind of error rate I'd really like.

Android has a Morse input method which would be entirely suitable for one-handed text input and there are certainly solutions for using an android phone as a keyboard, but I don't know how it'd handle things like arrow keys.

friedtofu•1d ago

Its been a while since this happened but I laid my motorcycle down, ended up fracturing my wrist. Honestly, if you aren't used to one handed typing its not worth the time to train to get good at it(I'm assuming they're right hand dominant) its all just muscle memory. If they can pick it up quickly go for it, keyboard bindings, or something like predictive text assistance, or even vim-like remappings are an interesting idea.

IMO - if possible just peck-type(like an old lady who is learning to use a keyboard) or use text to speech/AI & editing where possible - like in emails. They shouldn't be using the left arm/hand much right after surgery anyway. If they're programming definitely not as easy but still doable.

hackshack•1d ago

A keyboard with the keys pulled and replaced in the Dvorak "LH" (left hand) layout might be worth a try. Years ago, I had a hand injury for several weeks and this got me through. Took about a week or two to type reasonably well. It remaps the number row to one side for maximum use of the keys on the strong side.

August Dvorak developed these "LH" and "RH" layouts for amputees. The layouts are well thought out IMHO. It feels like typing on a numeric keypad.

innocentoldguy•1d ago

I used Dvorak when I injured my dominant hand. It took me about two weeks to feel comfortable with it. My hand healed a long time ago, but I still use Dvorak (the two handed version mostly) because I think it is easier than Qwerty. I highly recommend this solution.

fsiefken•1d ago

over the years i tried the following options, all have their down and upsides, I prefer the half-dvorak layout to the frogpad and the twiddler2, I also like the morse code solution, but input might be slower.

* mattias half-qwerty or a similar half-dvorak layout (different from rh/lh dvorak)

* frogpad (a onehanded keyboard)

* twiddler2 (a chording one-hand joystick/keyboard)

* morse code with a mouse, keyboard or special keying device https://makoa.org/jlubin/morsecode.htm

https://github.com/grahamwhaley/pico_vband https://github.com/acecentre/morace

* shorthand augment these methods with bref or superwrite alphabetic shorthand so you have to type around 40% less https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/esjhdk/bref_shor...

rcarmo•1d ago

I have one of these: https://artsey.io/ - it has only eight keys, and I love it: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/08/08/1230

The layout/project is a bit niche, but I can vouch that it works, even if slowly at first (I am mostly right-handed but ordered a left-handed one and it's become quite natural to use, although I will fumble some keys and symbols on occasion).

You can order something like a Keychron keyboard (they have many models that support VIA/QMK and full keyboard remapping) and implement the same layout, or something more "natural" like a mirror layout.

evanjrowley•1d ago

The Taipo layout is ported to QMK, ZMK, and KMK keyboards. It is meant to be useable with one hand. It's also a chording layout that requires far fewer keys than most keyboards. It's on my list of things to try this year: https://inkeys.wiki/en/keymaps/taipo

justinc8687•1d ago

Once their finger movement has been restored, I'd look into various large-split keyboards. The Kinesis Freestyle2 USB version has a large split (20") option that could help. They have screw hole mounts on the bottom which you could likely jerry-rig with a sling to put the keyboard in the proper position. I used it with a custom 3d-printed mount so that I could attach it to the arms of my chair.

The wireless version has less of a gap, but you could always just get two of them and use the left half of one and the right half of another.

Feel free to reach out to me at justin (at) justin-c (dot) com, if you want to talk. I spent about 5 years working on custom mounting options for keyboards after getting a severe RSI, ultimately proven to be partially caused by a rheumatic condition.

anamexis•1d ago

I will also plug the Keyboard.io Model 100 here. It has a ton of mounting options including tripod screws for custom solutions. The halves are connected with a standard ethernet cable so you can have them any distance apart.

https://shop.keyboard.io/products/model-100

justinc8687•1d ago

Another thing worth mentioning, if they are a coder, is that this is one of the places where some of the LLM tools can really shine. Many people provide a rough spec, then either (shutter) vibe-code or edit substantially once it produces it.

Having a RSI myself, I find that I can provide very detailed instructions in regular english, for which voice dictation works quite well to Cursor (but any others should work too), then it will produce code that I have to edit very little. For most people this wouldn't be an efficient flow, but it greatly helps me reduce typing, thus is beneficial to me.

With something like that, I believe you could do well pecking around with one hand for edits without needing to do much typing.

On Mac, Karabiner-Elements is incredibly useful to remap things, such that you can enable things like mousekeys or otherwise that would keep from having to move (either) hand very much. It's also a way to do as others have shown on this post and do a mirror layout or add something analogous to layers without having to buy new keyboards.

rockemsockem•1d ago

I was in a full arm cast (including fingers) for 9 months in college while taking many CS classes and I just used my one hand to type on the full qwerty keyboard. It definitely slowed me down, but I got up to ~60 wpm with the one hand. I think it's easier to just stick with the layout you know vs trying to learn to type with one hand in a new layout.

The nice part is that I can still type pretty quickly one-handed (maybe 50 wpm? Haven't measured in a while) and it's convenient sometimes.

Shlongkikong•1d ago

I broke a meta carpal on my left hand several months ago and dealt with a similar issue. I ended up making a little python script that would use whisper to record with a button press, did some small corrections and then saved it to clipboard. It was very helpful. I did end up needing my regular clipboard as well, so I just had it save and paste with a slightly different shortcut sequence.

kldg•1d ago

I severely burned most of dominant hand about a decade ago in a grease fire. One-handing the whole keyboard was fine enough (70-100wpm to 15-20wpm) that I didn't bother looking for a better solution, but I was able to use the injured hand enough to press modifier keys as needed. Unless they plan on working while recovering, I'd try out not making any explicit modifications. Good excuse to catch up on movie-watching.

toss1•1d ago

The best solution for me was to type with the left hand and switch from a mouse to a Logitech MX Ergo thumb-trackball — the key advantage is it can sit inside the sling and instantly give me full functionality.

My use case was shoulder surgery that kept my dominant right hand in a sling for two+ months, but I could use my fingers after a week or so, and much of my work is CAD.

It took only a few hours to completely get used to it, and I never went back to a mouse. While left-hand-only typing speed obviously went down, this was significantly mitigated by having a full function point-&-click device.

It turns out this setup is also really helpful when working in tight spaces where a mouse is near-impossible, such as airplanes or tight luncheon booths.

Even typing emails and multi-page documents left-handed was tolerable for 10 weeks, but if it had been longer, I probably would have looked into a chorded one-handed keyboard solution, as the learning cost would have been worth it.

I hope this helps, and good on you for helping your friend, and I hope they get well fast!

zackify•1d ago

I would use wispr flow or these other whisper voice to text tools that use ai to be even better

Findecanor•1d ago

There is Edgar Matias's "Half Keyboard" layout, where the right hand's keys of a regular keyboard are mirrored on the left hand when holding a modifier key with your thumb. The idea is that if you have learned touch-typing then muscle memory for the right hand should be available also on the left.

Matias wrote an article [1] about it and then made it into a commercial product [2], but the concept should be possible on any programmable keyboard. Perhaps it would be possible with a AutoHotkey (MS-Windows) or Karabiner (MacOS) script otherwise.

There is a large scene for more-or-less DIY "ergonomic" mechanical programmable keyboards with various different physical layouts, but common themes are 1) that they are split in a pair of two physical keyboards and 2) that they have multiple thumb-keys for modifiers / Return / Space. You could build and program just one half of such a pair. Many years ago I programmed an ErgoDox with the HalfKeyboard layout, just to try it out, and that ErgoDox I had built on a budget from mostly salvaged vintage components.

[1]: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/One-Handed-Touch-Typin...

[2]:https://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/

TurkishPoptart•1d ago

Looks cool, but not sure why it's $600...

kelnos•1d ago

~25 years ago I injured my right (dominant) hand and wasn't able to type with it for about 2.5 months. I figured the time was short enough that I would just use a regular keyboard, one handed, and live with the slowdown.

It was annoying, certainly, and while I did get faster typing only with my left hand, I of course never got close to full speed. But it was fine, I survived, and I don't think it would have been worth spending the money, as well as the time to learn a new keyboard setup.

Remember that a one-handed keyboard (or some other arrangement) isn't going to bring you back up to full speed immediately. It's probably going to take a few weeks to learn, and you might not even get back up to full speed at all.

bombcar•1d ago

I don't know the current versions, but years ago I remember a "chording keyboard" for the HP Palmtop - it was IIRC a handheld device with five or six keys that you typed by pressing keys at the same time.

The guy was able to type pretty darn fast with it, one handed.

synack•1d ago

Last year I had an injury that left me one handed for a few months. I managed to hunt-and-peck my way to a patched QMK firmware for an Adafruit Macropad I had lying around. I set it up with the artsey.io layout and set the cheatsheet as my desktop wallpaper.

I found the Learning Artsey book from Discord helpful and managed to get up to 15 WPM in about a week with regular practice. Still quite tedious for coding, but good enough for emails and IRC.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128

https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/qmk_firmware/tree/artsey_ma...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/artseyio/artsey/main/layou...

https://discord.gg/UAMMaASc

owenpalmer•1d ago

I would reach out to Charachorder and ask if you can get a priority shipment of one of their products. They spend a lot of time making informative videos about their product, and disabilities is a significant use case. If your friend is willing to make the tradeoff of a steep learning curve for raw input speed, this seems like your best bet. I have never personally used the device, but from what I can see, it requires very little finger movement.

https://www.charachorder.com/

illwrks•1d ago

Jeff Geerling recently posted a video of a keyboard with inbuilt speech to text, my might be of interest!

https://youtu.be/qQ42lbLFxv8?si=AyZOQnv0ZI6xiYHm

mywacaday•1d ago

I went through the same as few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710046

It depends on what you're doing but the biggest help to me was the dictate button in outlook to draft email then just edit, probably a lot more use now with copilot etc. Your friend needs to be prepared for a significant drop in productivity at the computer and at home. Even simple things like making a sandwich or getting dressed will be difficult and slow, especially at the start.

andix•1d ago

Special keyboards for one-handed typing are probably very expensive because of two reasons. First the small market, not a lot of potential customers, a lot of development costs and high per-unit production costs. And second because they are often paid for by insurance or a public program to bring people with disabilities to the workplace. It's a bargain for insurance to buy a keyboard for 1000$ and enable a person to do their job, instead of paying for decades of sick leave.

SamuelAdams•1d ago

Surprised no one mentioned this, but voice dictation is pretty good in both Windows and MacOS. Would it be possible to use a combination of one hand and voice dictation, AI text prediction (autocomplete), etc?

indianmouse•1d ago

Aah!

Just in time...

Though a bit late to the party!!

I'm on the recovery path of my dominant hand boxer's fracture... A month and a few weeks to go yet for the cast removal...

Surprisingly got used to type with two fingers and minimal movement though have to place the external keyboard at an awkward angle.

My 2 cents would be to try out a few existing possibilities before investing heavily on alternates. Sometimes all such just-for-the-time-extensions (or should I call it contraptions?) do not have a useful after life after the utilization or in-need-of period.

I have had many injuries / broken bones (or at least 7 more times! (And please don't judge me based on this. I'm either that clumsy or those were freak incidents...)) and none that were created / acquired to help me out during those restricted movement periods have stayed with me...

Anyways, the mileage may vary... My short advice... Try for sometime (if you could get somethings loaned or borrowed) for a short / extended-short periods and invest...

Tough times and best wishes and speedy recovery to get back on feet and to a healthy normal!

This too shall pass...

seany•1d ago

There was just a 99% invisible podcast about exactly this topic.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/630-adapt-or-design/

pca2•1d ago

I have used a one-handed keyboard for 20 years. My current set up is using

- A 25 key Macropad (really an external numpad) Something like this, for around $50 USD https://www.dhgate.com/product/25keys-macro-keyboard-kit-pro...

- The keyboard supports QMK, the customizable open source keyboard firmware

- I programmed my own layout using the Frogpad style layout others have mentioned. Its central feature is that it is what's known as a "chording keyboard" in which you hit multiple keys at the same time, like a piano chord, to trigger different letters.

- The reduced keys on the keyboard mean I can comfortably produce any character at normal speed with one hand without moving my wrist in a way that would cause RSI.

If you want more info or a copy of my QMK config let me know.

Tsarp•1d ago

Maybe worth considering speech to text. Dictation has come a long way and if they are using a Mac any of the locally running whisper wrappers will work.

1. https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper (dictation + transcription)

2. https://carelesswhisper.app (does dictation only, and does it really well; cheapest)

3. https://superwhisper.com (both local and hosted models + lots of bells and whistles, but much higher pricing)

etoxin•1d ago

Arm amputee programmer here. There are some wild hardware solutions out there.

What I found best was

- a standard qwerty keyboard (I didn't want to be restricted to custom keyboards)

- A learning program called Five Finger Typist. https://www.spectronics.com.au/product/five-finger-typist-2-...

Basically I'm hybrid touch typing. Because I cover the whole keyboard as I type the chance for error increases the longer I type. I quickly glance to know where i'm aligned.

In hindsight I should have learnt to use the F and J notches more.

I have extensively remapped my IDE shortcuts to be easier to trigger.

anonu•1d ago

I would think swipe-style keyboard on your phone would be a good solution (as long as its normal text and not code). I wonder if theres a KVM-like application for your phone and computer so swipes on your phone can send keypresses to the other side.

muzani•1d ago

An alternative is voice. I'm not trying to shill AI here; STT has been around for decades and it was one of my productivity hacks ten years ago.

But with all the AI around these days, the error correction is a lot better, and I'd expect more OSes can be fully voice operated within 5 years.

The tech also exists to move things around with a hand e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=shnW3VerkiM

misnamed•1d ago

A free mirror-based layout that goes beyond just letters: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/one-hand-touch-typing...

There are other options, but hardware solutions are really expensive

r24y•1d ago

I use a Moonlander keyboard: https://www.zsa.io/moonlander It's very easy to change the layout on these boards since you can do it directly from their website.

One of the left thumb keys "flips" the board so that the left half behaves like the right half. In my experience it's not hard to learn to type like this. Here's my layout: https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/oLyWr/latest/0

Bonus of using a Moonlander in this case is that you can unplug the unused right half and put it away if you don't need it.

jdr23bc•1d ago

A highly customizable split keyboard seems like the perfect solution for one handed typing.

I have one too & really enjoyed playing around with the layout editor. It makes it really easy to try out a new layout and revert changes. Expensive, but you're getting a ton of unique features for a niche market.

My coworkers have also recommended superwhisper for speech to text

rffn•1d ago

Many years ago I has some pretty good experience with a FrogPad. See http://www.frogpad.com/

Maybe it is possible to find one sold used. I think they are not available new anymore.

There different versions for left and right hand use.

trumbitta2•1d ago

In case it helps, https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/hands-free-coding/

astarion•1d ago

You could try one handed dvorak as a layout, macos supports it, not too sure about other systems.

PAPPPmAc•19h ago

I have a long fascination with weird input devices, owing partly to a predisposition to fine joint problems, and Chorders are always both super interesting in theory and kind of weird in practice, going all the way back to the Engelbart/SRI 5-key Keyset that was carried forward to the Alto.

Of the ones I've played with, I find the 7-key kind (4 fingers and 3 thumb positions) to be the most appealing, and I don't see them mentioned in the thread. Infogrip has sadly discontinued their commercial BAT offering, the "Spiffchorder" family ( https://www.chorder.org/wiki/doku.php/start ) use the same chord-set and are designed to be cheap and easy construction - I've made a few in different physical arrangements. I'm too qwerty habituated and never got _completely_ comfortable, but I've been up to tolerable a couple times.

My "normal" typing is mostly on conventional splits (Kinesis makes make some nice off-the-shelf options that just split and tent), largely to avoid shoulder issues. I recently tried a ortholinear split and... I'm pretty convinced they really don't have meaningful benefits.

MeIam•7h ago

Wouldn't think that they could use their voice. I had a serious shoulder injury and a surgery an all that. At first I tried my other arm but it would get tired. Voice conversion to text works really well nowadays. Voice to text worked for me.

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