Moonlanding

Back in July, I was working faithfully on the r/rougelikedev 2022 code-along before I hit a small snag.

The start of the trouble was that I was working without a proper keyboard, hunched over my laptop in  temporary deskless working conditions that was causing me to develop real pain.

So, of course, I over-engineered a solution.  I did a lot of research into split-ergonomic keyboards that I had always had an interest in, and ended up with a Moonlaner. 

I have used split-keyboards like the Microsoft Natural basically since they were first made mainstream in the early 90s, and followed the trends of reverse incline and really thought that I was doing great.  

But on further investigation and introspection, I discovered that these encouraged an elbows-out hunched posture.  If I wanted to bring my elbows in and straighten up my back and open my chest, the key pads needed to move further apart and the reverse incline needed to be traded for "tenting".

Fine, that is all good so far and with only a little bit of awkward re-learning to type I am feeling a lot better.

But there are a few more complications.  The customized key mappings use layers to handle a shortage of things like function keys and numpads.  And, retraining myself for a UK layout, I've also had a shortage of things like alt-gr, pipe, and backslash.  Which, for writing code, this is pretty crippling.

Now, obviously, there are plenty of UK centric coding layouts for the Moonlander.  It is only my fault that I stalled for six months in finding a better setup for myself.

But here I am now, ready to pick up the LOX project again and complete the series.  And ready to tune any further issues with my keyboard layout as I go.