When you're trying to improve your typing skills, there are quite a few things you can do: learning to touchtype, getting an ergonomic / split keyboard, or moving to a better layout than QWERTY. However, if you're like me (small hands, short pinkie), chances are that none of these will be of much help when you have to type a lot of special characters, for example in programming. That's because special characters are typically hard to reach. Most layouts banish them to the edges of town, leaving them almost entirely to the right pinkie and to shift+<number>, which forces your hands to wander very far from the home-row on which your muscle-memory is based.
I'm currently experimenting with a solution to this state of things. Thanks to a wonderful little program called AutoHotkey, you can tweak your keyboard in great ways; what I decided to do was to leverage the largely-unused (but very easy to reach) CapsLock. I basically turned CapsLock into a new meta key (which is not Ctrl, Alt, AltGr, Win or Cmd), allowing me to get a completely blank layer that is independent of any existing key or shortcut. I then associated the most easily-reachable keys to the most common (and hardest to reach with typical layouts) special characters I need.
The result is that, by pressing capslock+<home-row-key>, I now get special characters with less effort and less wandering.
What you see above is the layout I'm currently using. It's hardly perfect; it's based mostly on correspondence of fingers across the row and other mnemonic tricks I use to visualize their locations, rather than frequency, simplicity, or strain. If your editor is configured to auto-close brackets, for example, you'll probably find yourself using the left pinkie in one-handed combos a bit too much. In that case, from an ergonomic perspective, it would probably make more sense to swap brackets across, so that the left pinkie is combined most often with a right-hand key.
It's also nowhere near complete. There are tons of special characters missing. That's because I concentrated on my immediate need, which was to reduce the number of times I'm forced to leave the home row because of my short right pinkie, particularly for brackets. It's just a starting point, but it shows the technique you can then adapt to your own needs. I wish someone would come up with a "standard" layout for special chars, with some real thought to ergonomics and frequencies; then again, programming languages can vary so much (for example there are lots of $ in Perl, but very few in Python) that I guess it would be difficult to appease everyone.
Here is a AutoHotkey script for QWERTY and AutoHotkey script for COLEMAK (that's actually what I use). If you install AutoHotkey, just save the script as AutoHotkey.ahk in the resulting installation folder and it will be automatically executed when you start the program (it can also be run at startup).
If you are on macOS/OSX, things are a bit more awkward, and I'll cover that in another post next week. Happy hacking!
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