draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

Some 10 years ago, I picked up a simple USB keyboard from the scrap box of a hackerspace before to see whether it really was broken. It was missing one key, which made me think maybe that's all that's wrong with it. Turns out I can do without the Numlock key and all other keys work perfectly. When I have to press the Numlock key I use a pen. I never had to move another keycap onto it.

My idea when I took this keyboard was to same working tech from being dumped and destroyed and to have a random spare in case I needed a USB keyboard because I only had spare PS/2 and one very cheap and bad 2.4 GHz USB keyboard (if not 800 MHz). But there's something special about it. It's a BLANK keyboard, which seems to be a brand solely marketing keyboards without any markings or labeling on any key. I had heard of them before and thought it's an interesting idea. But I wouldn't have chosen to buy one. At some point I needed a USB keyboard and tried the blank one for a while. Since then I use this keyboard for my desktop PC intentionally, not because I don't have another one. I thought I'd write down my experience in getting used to it and what it did to my typing.

It appears a bit surprising to me now but at my first experience with the Blank keyboard was what I expected at the time. I was using it at an opened laptop with a broken keyboard. And I was very glad to have a labeled reference in front of me. Typing a word or two took ten or twenty times as long because I didn't know what most of the keys were. Well, some are obvious (Return, Escape, Space, etc.). I must have cought a particularly patient time in my life. Because I kept trying to hit the right keys when typing. I also didn't really type long texts on that machine at that time. So it wasn't too much of a dive into label-less typing. There must have been enough moments where I hit the right key first try to motivate me to keep trying and maybe learn to type blindly. When the laptop keyboard had dried sufficiently I was very glad about being able to switch back again. Such a relief. But I chose to go back to the blank one for a while every now and then. There were so many times where I started to type one or half a key to the left or to the right, so I started to produce gibberish, deleted the last few characters, adjusted my hand's alignment a few millimeters and try again. Sometimes (actually still pretty often) it took five or more attempts to hit the right keys. That was how I typed for a long time. When I wanted to type "Foo Bar Baz" I typed something like "Gpp<<<Doo<<<Foo Nar<<ar<<<Nae<<<Nar<<<Bae<<ar Bau<u<u<u<t<t<z", sometimes much longer. That was the period where I was surprised to bring up enough patience to continue. There was pretty much no progress for months.

I'll leave it at that one example. But it was a long time during which I accepted that I often had to type things three or four times. I eventually stopped because I hardly noticed any progress. But when I again needed a USB keyboard and the blank one was the nearest one, I gave it another try. And I was glad about how quickly I got back into it. Now I did notice progress after a few weeks. Maybe the fact that I was off and on that keyboard every other day played a roll in that. That was a couple of months ago. And I am happy to be able to say that I am typing blindly now. Still not without errors. I probably hit a wrong key about a dozon times in this paragraph already. But it's bearable. And I'm not sure how many such mistakes I made before on a labeled keyboard because I never payed that much attention to that. Typing blindly always was something that I always thought of a very nice skill to have but one infinitely far away. Now I look once at the keyboard before I start typing and that's enough. Maybe I wouldn't need to do that on a keyboard with very clear J and F markings. But I doubt it. When I look at the keyboard before starting to type I look for the first key that I want to press, not F or J.

Now that I got that far I will probably continue to get better at hitting the right key at first try more often. Because I noticed that I stopped lookign at other keyboards as well, even with nice large labels or glowing keys. That should give me the necessary training over the next couple of years. Although right now I don't feel like I'm making any progress again.