I’ve been using a Sofle split for almost a year, probably in about 30-40% of my typing. Despite tweaking my setup as best I can, I still find the experience difficult.
One issue that seems to have a big effect is that I still think of the position of mouse in my dominant hand and keyboard with my other hand as useful.
I use it often for everything from casual surfing to editing. For example during editing you’re often selecting text with the mouse and doing some minor editing with your other hand. Split keyboards seem to really remove this efficient option since both your hands need to be used most times.
A lot of people who extol the benefits of split keyboards are comparing to traditional keyboards when your tasks are static.
Form and function are inextricably linked: one will inform the other. A lot of the ergo-split community focuses on the use case where you move your hands as little as possible, and the designs tend to revolve around maximizing that ideal. And they are damn good at it. The drawback, as you note, is that it’s a design that expects you not to move your hands around: it encourages keyboard navigation and shortcuts in place of using the mouse as much as possible.
That said, you can get around it. You can use layers to move common shortcuts to the left hand, so you don’t have to do the whole “Stretch my hand across two units” dance. Or, you can look into something like a macro pad.
Me, I just deal. The comfort when typing is well worth the tradeoff, to me. I’ll favor avoiding the mouse when possible, and just dance my one hand across both halves when needed. It’s not a huge deal to me, but the whole point is personalization: find what works best for you!
Ok so I use a split since two months and the switch is certainly not automatic but the solutions are fairly simple. I’m a good exemple of a user scenario that requires a lot of one-handed operations because I mainly edit text and not writing it and I use a lot of GUI related to graphic work (illustrator mainly but also photoshop). For the following process, I should make clear that I’m on a Mac and it’s clearly a big plus since this platform promotes consistent patterns of shortcuts.
Text edition :
- I have a ⇧ and a ⌘ key on my thumbs and arrows on a layer triggered by a thumb. Lateral arrows are set to trigger ⎇+arrow when long press and ⌘+arrow when double presses. With the ⇧ on the right thumb and the arrows (and the layer switch key) on my left hand. Give it a try, I can really quickly select words, lines, etc. For a quick word selection/replacement I have also a simple macro that trigger : “⎇+⬅️, ⇧+⎇+➡️, ⌘-c” (the copy part is just in case I want this bit of text in my pasteboard.
- I use vim whenever I can. It makes the use of a mouse irrelevant, don’t worry the main selection operation are easy to learn.
GUI
- It’s more tricky but I really advise to take a note of every friction in your workflow and find a solution when mandatory. I could give some of my settings but it’s very specific to the app I use. The only advice that could match any situation is a “esc” signal that is always accessible as a combo with the W+E combination, in every layer, I also have a space and I try to get the maximum access of elementary keys but when it replicates a primary action on my right hand, I hide it on my left hand (combo, double-tap)
I should mention that I use Colemak and that it certainly help compared to layout leaning toward hand switch (Dvorak, Bepo…). But if you’re on QWERTY it should be good.
I moved my mouse between the two splits.
Sounds like you could benefit from a trackball
Single handed operation is usefull for my use case as well (mainly CAD and graphic work). I’ve tried various approaches:
- Swap hands feature from QMK: it works, but has some limitations. I also just made a layer with swapped layout to work around some of the limitations, but ultimately I just didn’t find it very convenient.
- I then proceeded to write my own “autoswap” feature, inspired by autoshift. Basically it is swap hands by holding any alpha key. So tap Q is Q, hold Q results in P. That worked brilliantly, but the compromise is that you can’t use any tap-hold functions on your alphas (like layer taps or homerow mods). Since I don’t like homerow mods anyway, I could manage with my 36 key layout, but it was definitely a compromise to fit all mods and layer taps on thumbs or combos. Going up to 40 keys would probably have made this a pretty decent solution though.
- Then I added a trackball to my keyboard. Having the trackball integrated still required me to move my right hand slightly away from the home row, but its much less of an issue than before, and it made any swap hands feature redundant. I definitely recommend looking into something like a Charybdis, probably the best straight out of box solution (out of box solution being relative ofc in this mad world of DIY ergo boards).
- Right now I’m experimenting with a layout inspired by TAIPO; its a chording layout, that is intended for use with 2 hands on a 20 key layout, but left and right are mirrored, so it is fully functional in one handed operation as well. Its definitely a learning curve, but I’m surprised by how natural it feels. Its like a 10 key macropad, which is somehow magically equally functional as a full keyboard, without feeling like a compromise! I definitely recommend at least reading up on it: https://inkeys.wiki/en/keymaps/taipo ; it may be a bit much to get into if you are new to ergo keyboards and small layouts though, so I would suggest first getting familiar with something like a 36-40 key split and toying around in QMK.
