[OT] Keyboard with ctrl, alt, shift, etc in the thumbs

[Eric S. Johansson]

Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> Le Thursday 27 July 2006 08:54, Pupeno a écrit :
>> Hello,
>> Does anybody know about a cheap keyboard that I could get somewhere in
>> Berlin that has the special keys ctrl, alt, shift, tab, etc in the thumbs ?
>> Similar keyboards are:
>> http://www.maltron.com/maltron-kbd-ltype-intro.html
>> http://www.maltron.com/maltron-kbd-flat.html
>> http://www.maltron.com/maltron-kbd-jtype.html
>> http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/images/kb_adv-pro_met720x471.jpg
>> I am looking for an alternative until I can buy a Maltron keyboard.
>> Thank you.
> 
> Out of curiosity, anybody knows if do programmers often use this kind of 
> crazyness?

injured programmers do.  When you make your living by your hands, and 
your work destroys your hands, you will do anything, untested surgery, 
weird keyboards, bizarre drugs, anything to get your hands back and to 
be able to continue working.

while speech-recognition (what I use) is certainly useful for assisting 
programming, it is not sufficient by itself.  There is one open-source 
project right now (URL for project and mailing list below) aimed at 
making speech-recognition a useful method of programming.  It's getting 
there but quite frankly, repetitive motion injuries is so painful that 
it saps your energy and after a day of work, you have all you can do to 
make food or drive home.

http://voicecode.iit.nrc.ca/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VoiceCoder/

so, want to do something socially beneficial with coding?  Help write 
code for this project, play nice with Windows (because that's where 
speech recognition works), and listen to us about user interface issues 
because we live them everyday.

---eric