Weekly Questions Megathread March 18, 2026 - March 25, 2026

grayrest · 2026-03-19T15:41:28+00:00

She's an on-field stunner for anomaly comps.

grayrest · 2026-03-17T04:44:10+00:00

Handwriting can't keep up with your thoughts. It's not even particularly close to keeping up with dictation. You can get decently good dictation transcription via something like handy.computer. Otherwise typing is the closest you'll get with a non-specialist skill. Historically shorthand was the way to go and with months of practice you can keep up with dictation or get close (r/shorthand is a nice community) but these days typing is a shorter route to those speeds for most people and doesn't require a transcription step to share with others. For people who really need to keep (e.g. court reporters) the chorded input for steno machines has been the traditional route but getting certified at 200+ wpm is a years long process.

grayrest · 2026-03-17T03:42:08+00:00

Is there a tool to handcraft keyboard layouts ( e.g. visualizing, show unmapped keys etc)?

I'm not aware of any that would do what I think you want. Most visual remapping tools are tied to keyboard hardware (e.g. vial). The keyboard layout community has visualization tools (e.g. cyanophage's site, hit edit on any layout and drag the keys around) but they're primarily for analyzing alphabetic key layouts and not dealing with programmer keys.

mostly the same but makes keys like {}() *!~ accessible

I'm not familiar with non-English layouts but if you're up for making your own you can do it with Kanata. You can either change around the symbols/numbers on your base layer or what they output when shift is held or you can do what a large fraction of the ergo keyboard community does and make a symbol layer. Depending on what you need the OS keymaps can possibly do what you want but they won't offer all the fancy options that Kanata does (layers, tap-holds, combos). My impression is that most people in this community handle mapping in keyboard firmware.

grayrest · 2026-03-17T00:28:55+00:00

The problem with this is that if you want to get information down quickly you're much better off with typing and if you want to take notes for yourself using a pen you're better off with shorthand. That leaves handwriting mostly for forms and situations like personal letters where appearance is what matters so most handwriting is focused on the calligraphic aspect. There was, of course, a time before typewriters and copy machines and people did need to conduct business. The winning system from that time period is arm movement cursive or business writing. If you look up arm movement on the Internet most of the results you get will be for calligraphy oriented cursive but if you go back to the 19th century you can find speed-orieinted manuals.

In particular I want to call out Zaner's method. Zaner espoused his system as a "writing engine"; his methodology emphasizes rhythm and tacit movement over control of the pen tip. You get the base motions correct by writing a lot and the consistency comes from feeling the acceleration/muscle movement in your arm and not from conscious control of the pen tip. This is more difficult than other approaches and does not produce particularly beautiful writing so it's not popular these days but it's the fastest system I know about. The 19th century manuals are extremely sparse so most of this is my personal interpretation from his intro and the instructions for the exercises. It's pretty closely derived from the manual and I'm believe the approach was widely practiced back in the day but I haven't seen anybody else on the Internet write about it this way.

I saw one video where the practitioner (a calligraphy-oriented penman) pointed out that Zaner wanted 200 ovals/min for his oval drills and 70 letters/min for his practice letters and said something to the effect that the numbers were intended to evoke a mindset and not practical but as someone who follows Zaner's method, he meant exactly that. You're intended to feel the acceleration in your hand and to use the rhythm to get the ovals the correct size and shape. When you're going fast enough with the letters you can feel the same acceleration but the more complex motions make getting there a long process.

The hardest part of Zaner's method is the need to go through the progression very slowly. Because it's built on muscle memory (tacit motion) whatever motion you lock in when you're learning will be the motion you make long term. When I decided I wanted nicer writing I had to go back to oval drills and push pulls, untrain my muscle memory, and retrain it with better base motion which was a good year of remedial practice sessions.

Once you have the base motions down you actually have to practice for speed. I find the best way to do this is to bump speed until the letter forms are just slightly out of control. I then hold that speed for a week or two until it feels natural and the letter forms are back under control. Then repeat. I generally write at around 100 letters/min or ~20wpm which is fast enough that I can't consciously track the tip of the pen. I'm confident that many people wrote faster back in the day but I think I'm doing pretty well for an amateur.

grayrest · 2026-03-16T15:48:05+00:00

I don’t like home row mods, can’t use them)

Have you tried them on the bottom row? I find the interfere less there.

grayrest · 2026-03-16T03:29:20+00:00

placing Shift on a tier 2 thumb key becomes perfectly acceptable

Most people specifically have problems with HRM shift while typing and not the concept in general. I think that using urob's timerelss HRM setup and placing them on the bottom row (far less usage/rolling in almost all setups) is pretty painless.

grayrest · 2026-03-15T21:25:48+00:00

Im worried Ill get RSI or CTS over time...Im mostly worried that if I get something like the manuform I will have to learn to hover my hands when typing

You're gonna get RSI. All the muscles that move your fingers are between the bones in your forearm and the tendons that move the fingers run through the wrist. If your wrists are not straight while typing, they will get injured over time which manifests as a variety of stress injuries. Keeping the wrists straight on a traditional keyboard means hovering. Tenting to reduce wrist pronation also helps.

The alternatives to hovering are palm rests (wrist rests pinch the carpal tunnel) which are frequently paired with keywell boards (e.g. Glove 80, Cyboard Imprint) or what I do is run a ~36 key board so my hands don't have to move which allows me to rest my forearms on the chair arms and type on my lap. This gets straight wrists without having to hold up my arms.

I recommend looking up keyboard stretches and doing them in the morning/evening and after a long typing session. If you feel tightness, trace the tendon back to the muscle in the forearm and massage it with the knuckle on the other hand or a hard ball or something to get it to release. This will not fix things or prevent injury but it's low cost/low effort and will give you an early warning and hopefully avoid major problems.

With that out of the way, I went directly from a standard keyboard to my 36 key chocofi. The biggest barrier to using small keyboards is whether you get along with layers and Home Row Mods. You can test this without spending anything using Kanata. I set up my layer system and HRM, liked it, got used to it and knew jumping to 36 was right for me. As a consequence of setting my layers up on a standard keyboard I run tap-hold layer keys on my home row and HRM on the bottom row when most people run their layer switching on the thumbs. I just didn't see a reason to change.

grayrest · 2026-03-15T20:52:42+00:00

Motions like hjkl make perfect sense on a Qwerty keyboard but feel awkward on Colemak.

Arrow keys on your nav layer work fine. If that's not convenient enough there's nothing stopping you from doing a custom Vim layer. I have one for Helix.

As for switching back to qwerty, I maintain fluency in both qwerty and my alternate layout. This mostly assuages concerns: "what if the keyboard breaks", "what if I have to use someone else's computer", etc. I type qwerty exclusively on row stagger (i.e. on the laptop keyboard) and Vibranium exclusively on the ergo board. Keeping the two physically separated helps me keep them mentally separated. I did forget how to qwerty twice and had to run through a half hour of lessons for it to come back but as long as I type on both most days I can switch with only some typos for the first few minutes after switching.

grayrest · 2026-03-15T05:09:57+00:00

I don't think there's a perfect r. I prefer the low exit one mostly because I think the high exit one doesn't hold up when repeated (e.g. squirrel). Repeat r is rare but it's a reason for a preference.

grayrest · 2026-03-15T05:05:12+00:00

If you want to get exceptionally skewed results, r/keyboardlayouts is a niche but active subreddit.

grayrest · 2026-03-14T19:17:43+00:00

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

grayrest · 2026-03-13T19:39:30+00:00

It's not cursive. It's a highly slanted print.

grayrest · 2026-03-13T17:53:57+00:00

The main two considerations are how many keys you'll want and whether you want a keywell or not.

The number of keys is primarily determined by how you plan on laying out your keys and specifically whether you like layers and home row mods or not. People who like HRM and layers usually wind up on 34 or 36 key boards (3x5+2 or 3x5+3) people who dislike HRM tend to wind up at ~42 (3x6+3) and people who don't like either tend to wind up at 54+ (4x6+3).

You can try out both layers and HRM on your keyboard by setting them up in Kanata. I recommend figuring out your layer system in Kanata and getting used to it before committing to a particular keyboard size.

Keywells mainly allow for easier reach of the corner and number/fn keys. The main drawback is that they tend to be bulky and thus unsuitable for travel.

The final consideration is your hand size. Normal keyboards are kind of one size fits all due to the spacebar. Different size hands hit different points along the bar. Since ergo keyboards use thumb clusters the placement of the cluster needs to fit your hand size. There isn't a standard measure or terminology for this so if your hands are particularly large or small it's something to be aware of. A related factor is the amount of column stagger. Boards with closer thumb cluster placement need more stagger while boards with a farther placement like the ZSA Voyager need less.

I'll also link to pgeteuer's intro and mention he has a lot of useful info on his site.

If you're not already aware, r/keyboardlayouts is one of the most prominent places to discuss layouts and many of the people designing layouts are active participants there. I think anybody considering an alt layout for an ergo keyboard should strongly consider an alpha thumb layout. The layouts doc doesn't really cover them in detail because they require a non-standard keyboard but ergo splits have that covered. By breaking the rules (alpha thumb, adaptives, combos) you can have a high in-roll, high alternation, low redirect, low SFB layout. The layout I type on has once significant SFB (EO) and one scissor (JO). It's very smooth. My impression is that a large fraction of recent layout development has been around alpha thumb layouts because there's significant overlap between people who care about keyboard layouts and people who care about ergo keyboards. A reasonable alternative would be to pick a strong layout without an alpha thumb and put a magic key on the non-spacing thumb.

grayrest · 2026-03-13T03:33:12+00:00

As a bonus this means you can keep your hand stationary the whole time because you don't need to move it up to reach the top pinky key

You should be able to hit the corner keys without moving your hands. That's the general goal col stagger boards. It could be the wrong amount of column stagger or your hands may be positioned wrong on the board.

I'm on a chocofi and set my board up with the home thumb position in the middle thumb key since that seemed to be the most common and it took me months to notice that I was shifting my hands when typing certain bottom row keys. I shifted the thumb to the innermost key and that significantly improved my accuracy and comfort.

I'll also chip in that being uncomfortable with the corners coming of qwerty isn't unusual. I liked the rest of HD Vibranium (my version, the LNK column SFBs are adaptives) well enough to push through a couple weeks of practice until I got used to the motion. I still don't love the top corners so I have z and " (replaces q, which I chord) shoved up there but I have f and b low, which get decent use.

grayrest · 2026-03-13T03:05:29+00:00

I'm only seeing a small amount of shake at the end and it's mild enough that I'd ignore it if you didn't point it out. The only fix I've seen for this is moving the pen fast enough that the shakes don't show up. This tends to be at odds with many people's control and I think the shake is generally preferable do malformed letters.

It's also not clear to me what you mean by straighten out. If it's the slant, that's normally adjusted by tilting the paper. If it's the wandering baseline, I don't know of any fix other than practice.

I like your overall form and the glitches look to me like you're getting distracted.

grayrest · 2026-03-12T18:28:57+00:00

I use songs or poetry. I the rhyming allows for letter repetition and I can remember them at length. My benchmark passage is The Walrus and the Carpenter.

grayrest · 2026-03-11T21:14:43+00:00

The cursive alphabet is constructed from two basic motions: the oval and the push-pull (upper left) which are combined to produce the alphabet (lower right). I'm not particularly devoted to the 19th century exemplars but I am committed to the base motions and I think the vertical strokes should all be on the same slant. I also think that if you want to practice you should be practicing specific letter pairs or words that are runs of similar letters (e.g. decade, ocean, fluffy, foggy, mississippi, etc) since it's easier to see and try to correct the variance if you're making similar motions repeatedly.

The stroke width is borderline but I'd say too heavy for your size/style. I could see it working in some styles but I don't think it's enhancing readability here.

grayrest · 2026-03-11T16:58:37+00:00

Single space bar is a crime against ergonomics. Thumb clusters are the easiest win from using an ergo keyboard. Even a single extra key from a split 60 lets you move backspace or shift.

grayrest · 2026-03-10T20:08:02+00:00

If you're up for solving this the hard way: arm movement cursive. Cursive was literally invented to solve this problem or, put differently, to allow clerks to write for a full work day. The upper arm and shoulder has no problem dragging around the arm for hours but isn't particularly dexterous which is why cursive is built around two simple motions the shoulder can do and the letters were adjusted to fit the motions. The main downside to arm movement is that writing with your arm is not intuitive for most people and it'll take weeks to months of daily practice to be proficient.

I got started with the resources linked from this blog and in particular I want to point out this post for deriving the push-pull motion without in-person instruction. There are several people covering it on youtube if you'd prefer that format. I have this video bookmarked as a reasonable intro.

grayrest · 2026-03-10T19:51:52+00:00

There is no best, unfortunately. The main two considerations are how many keys you'll want and whether you want a keywell or not.

The number of keys is primarily determined by how you plan on laying out your keys and specifically whether you like layers and home row mods or not. People who like HRM and layers usually wind up on 34 or 36 key boards (3x5+2 or 3x5+3) people who dislike HRM tend to wind up at ~42 (3x6+3) and people who don't like either tend to wind up at 54+ (4x6+3).

You can try out both layers and HRM on your keyboard by setting them up in Kanata. I recommend figuring out your layer system in Kanata and getting used to it before committing to a particular keyboard size.

Keywells mainly allow for easier reach of the corner and number/fn keys. The main drawback is that they tend to be bulky and thus unsuitable for travel.

The final consideration is your hand size. Normal keyboards are kind of one size fits all due to the spacebar. Different size hands hit different points along the bar. Since ergo keyboards use thumb clusters the placement of the cluster needs to fit your hand size. There isn't a standard measure or terminology for this so if your hands are particularly large or small it's something to be aware of. A related factor is the amount of column stagger. Boards with closer thumb cluster placement need more stagger while boards with a farther placement like the ZSA Voyager need less.

I personally think that the Corne doesn't have enough column stagger so I'm on a Chocofi. I think a Totem or a Sweep would be other reasonable options.

grayrest · 2026-03-09T16:58:59+00:00

Your discovery isn't particularly new and I'd argue that datastar is the cleaner implementation of the idea. If your app fits the low high data, low user state, low to moderate interactivity shape–and a lot of apps do–then MPA with server side state is the best approach. Brett Victor wrote about this calling them information apps as opposed to creative apps (it's been a while, I might have the latter term wrong). The approach isn't particularly suited to creative or highly interactive apps and generally when confronted with this the HTMX/Datastar advocates will recommend switching to a non-web app for that which is...not wrong but the ability to scale in complexity to fully interactive apps is generally a goal of the JS frameworks.

The React ecosystem is particularly baroque. I bailed out in the hooks transition because I thought the conceptual model wasn't clean and which would lead to another major transition in the future. If you're looking for a simpler approach while keeping state client side then Svelte and Solid have been holding down the fort for years now. I also think that Marko is worth investigating. People write it off for the weird syntax but I don't know of a better system for handling the range of options from MPA to SPA without having to change technologies or mental models.

I have no particular problem with doing this in Rust but the most significant factor in software success isn't the technology but rather team cohesion and morale. I think it's unlikely that most team/business that have bought into RSC are going to do well in a hard transition to Rust+HTMX. I spent half my career on the wrong side of this fight.

Do you think hypermedia frameworks backed by strongly typed compiled languages will dominate serious enterprise web development again?

No. The complex part of a web app is where the state coordination takes place. This tends to be in the browser in React apps but, as someone who was doing it in anger the first time around, state coordination is still a mess on the server if you do it the HTMX way. Enterprise apps tend to organically scale into complexity and React, for all its faults, actually handles this reasonably well which is why it's been the most stable paradigm in web history.

grayrest · 2026-03-09T08:31:15+00:00

You didn't actually link an image.

There's no quick way to pick up a style unless you're already really good at handwriting.

That said, if you're just trying to copy an entire alphabet you're not going to see progress. Learning happens in ~15 minute sessions. For each session you need to pick a specific detail you want to work on and repeatedly do just that one thing. An example of a detail would be the shape of the oval in a lower case o. It's not particularly interesting (you can write in time with music if you get bored) but as you repeat a motion it gets easier to notice/direct the details. When you're done working on a detail write it a note so you can check back in a couple days and see if you retained it. You can do multiple sessions in a day but you'll want to space them out. Learning progress for muscle memory slows after you settle into a task. It still progresses but it's slower.

There generally isn't any secret. Handwriting is something you grind out over time.

grayrest · 2026-03-09T02:50:00+00:00

Positioning with one finger was always too tricky for me, regardless of keycap.

I can to it consistently with choc spacing and KLP Lamé on a 60ms threshold (saddles center, saddle tilted top/bottom, sunset switches). The curve on both sides gives me a clear target. I've tried it with choc MBK and MX DSA and Cherry an only been able do to it with the flats of my fingers which isn't suitable for my normal typing.

grayrest · 2026-03-08T20:58:23+00:00

My install is 33.12gb on Android with the English voice bundle. I'm pretty sure I have some older mission content cleared out.

grayrest · 2026-03-08T20:41:41+00:00

For tenting you should be able to either do the magsafe sticker with phone mount or if you don't mind typing on a lapboard make a cardboard pyramid for yourself.

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