I started playing piano at age 6. I started learning to touch type at age 12, 13.

(I didn't get my first cellphone until I was 20. I used mine mostly as an mp3 player. I'm old, okay?)

I am HORRIFIED at how the keeb geeks talk about keyboards, and warm ups, and RSI prevention.

Yes, Qwerty is part of the problem.

Fingers have numbers. So many times I'm listening to a podcast and someone is like "middle finger? ring finger?" and there's some back and forth about what finger is the "index" finger. Fingers have numbers, musical notation gave them numbers hundreds of years ago, get with the times. The thumb is 1, the pinky is 5.

Fingers 1, 2, 3 are the strongest. I like these new keyboards that use more thumb clusters. Most of them don't go far enough imho.

Chopin invented piano training exercises to improve the strength and mobility of finger 4. He wanted finger 4 to be equal to the other fingers. I don't know anyone who has seriously tried his training regimen and wouldn't recommend this to anyone with an RSI.

Move from the shoulders. The biggest drawback of computer keyboards is that they don't use a lot of lateral movement coming from the shoulder. A pianist sits on a bench, not a chair, because they need to move laterally up and down the 88 keys of a piano. A split keyboard helps but really doesn't go far enough.

A lot of people who are switching from a staggered keyboard to an ortholinear keyboard, or to an ortholinear split, lament that "they were actually terrible touch typists". What they mean is that they were always using the "wrong" finger to type the letter B or something. This is not actually a problem. This is you, having adjusted the fingering to your personal needs. Pianists spend years learning what fingerings work best for them. My second piano teacher was appalled at how my first teacher taught my fingerings. Fingerings are incredibly personal but there's no talk of personal fingerings among the touch typing community. It's a real shame. Unique fingerings are normal, and there is a science and an art form to them, and it's every bit as important as whatever homerow mod you've got going on.

— Lori Dorn | July 4, 2025 | Photos By Dirk McGirk

DirkMcGirk very cleverly designed a mechanical keyboard with letter and number keys that look like hunks of Swiss and Cheddar cheese. Additional keys are also fashioned to look like other cheeseboard items, such as cheese knives, graters, a bottle of wine, and a jar of jam with a little mouse peeking out from the other end. DirkMcGirk quite humorously said that these two items have more in common than one might think.

Cheese and Mechanical Keyboards! These mouse adjacent hobbies have more in common than you would think. Both use pretentious adjectives to describe the sensory experience of the hobby. For example, if a cheese has a natural, safe to eat mold, cheese mongers prefer to call that a “bloom.” If a cheese stinks, it will be described as “robust.” The word “creamy” is an understandable adjective in the world of cheese, it is also used to describe keyboards in a much less real, more tasteless way.