Half-QWERTY

After discovering the Half Keyboard by Matias Corp., I was fascinated by it.

The idea is to only use one hand (preferably the left one) and type typical right-hand letters by holding the space key with your thumb which then mirrors the right side onto the left one. Thus you're using the same finger on the left hand which you would use on the right hand to type that key. But see for yourself:

Matias promises that you can reach 88% of your standard QWERTY typing speed.

While surfing around, I stumbled upon Curiosity is bliss. There, Julien Couvreur writes about a little app he wrote to demonstrate keyboard hooks by imitating a Half Keyboard on a standard keyboard. But Matias Corp. didn't like it and made him remove his software. But there's still a link to the Half-QWERTY thread in the AutoHotkey forums. There are several implementations of a Half Keyboard written in AutoHotkey. Finally you can type relatively fast while using the mouse.

Instead of using only QWERTY-layout, I implemented two additional locales: French AZERTY and German QWERTZ. The active layout is set according to the Windows setting. (Which I had to read from the registry as A_Locale returns the system locale which has nothing to do with the keyboard.) Also I recoded the first example from the AutoHotkey forums in a more compact manner (assigning keys in loops instead of hard-coded). Also I found a solution to the problem that the Capslock-LED wouldn't light up and when pressing Space while Caps is on, a space would be printed out before the desired letter.

For my keyboard locale, all numeric keys return the shifted punctuation signs when CapsLock is on.

Download: halfkeyboard.zip (223.45 KiB, 77 downloads)