Fingerworks Touchstream keyboard impressions

A couple months ago I decided to try a Fingerworks Touchstream LP keyboard to see if it would help with the pain I was having in my wrists. I've been using it regularly since and wanted to offer a little additional insight from my experiences. It turns out I've had a real love/hate relationship with the thing.

Typing is difficult and I've just never really gotten comfortable with it. I can't say for certain, but for people who are properly trained touch typists it is probably easier to adjust. For me, it's been an exercise in frustration. On a regular keyboard, I started out as a hunt and peck typist and only learned how to touch type with any speed through shear repetition. To put it simply, my technique stinks and all the flaws are badly exacerbated by the lack of tactile feedback from the Touchstream keyboard. In particular I have real problems with drift and get tons of incorrect characters. This has actually discouraged me from typing, the level of concentration required to use the keyboard has continued to be a burden. To say this is a bad situation would be an understatement, in fact, since I'm writing a book it's been a nightmare. However, I can't complain to a huge degree because I have actually been able to type with the keyboard. I have no pain when using it and that's definitely a good thing, it's just a frustrating experience. So it gets good points for allowing pain free typing, but loses far more for taking the enjoyment out of writing. This has annoyed me so much that I'm typing this using a regular keyboard. We'll see how long it lasts. A few weeks ago I tried my laptop keyboard for about two hours and then had to switch back to the Touchstream as I could feel the tension in my wrists. It's really surprising how much effort it takes to press the keys on a regular keyboard.

Where the touchstream really wins is with its gestures and not having to move your hands to use the mouse and cursor movement. You can setup half of the keyboard for the mouse and half for cursor movement. The gestures for cursor movement are truly great and definitely an improvement over the wrist twisting action required on a regular keyboard. Unfortunately, using it as a mouse is not super precise and I've always kept a real mouse hooked up along side. It is very nice in general usage to not have to move your hands to use the mouse, but I tend to prefer the regular mouse when I'm just surfing the web and at other times that don't require any typing. The downside of the integrated mouse and cursor movement is that it's also easy to get spurious characters from not properly placing your hands. This contributes to the frustration of using the keyboard as you have to dedicate far too much mental energy to insuring there are no extra characters creeping into your work. Even then, they still get through and that really bugs me.

Gestures, well gestures are just cool. To me, that's the best feature of the keyboard and the one thing that can make using it almost bearable. The standard gestures were easy to learn and most of them do not require much thought to use. As I'm using a regular keyboard I definitely miss the gestures. However, you do regain the ability to easily use keyboard shortcuts. On the Touchstream I found keyboard shortcuts to be problematic because you have to drop your fingers one at a time onto the modifier keys. For instance you can't just hit cmd/option/del, you have to hit cmd, then option, then delete and this always requires looking at the keyboard to make sure you hit the right locations. This is why gestures are so critical to the usage of the keyboard. Any commonly used keyboard shortcut pretty much has to be bound to a gesture to be usable. Unfortunately, that results in a lot of custom gestures and it becomes difficult to remember all of them.

Ultimately, my assessment after using the Touchstream for several months is that I really don't like it. If my wrists could handle it, I would switch back to a regular keyboard and mouse in a second. I love it because it allows me to type, but it brings it's own set of burdens and the net result is that I'm really unhappy with it. I accept the burdens to remove the pain, but I'd so much rather just have the old way back. The real problem is that the Touchstream makes me not want to type. In fact I bet if you compare the amount I posted on this site before getting the Touchstream and the amount after you'll find a significant drop. Especially for short link only type posts. I often just don't bother with them because it's too much effort to go through the contortions to create the post. I also feel like the quality is much lower then it used to be. My writing has felt forced and I feel this especially applies to the early chapters of my book. It seems strange to blame a keyboard for that, but it's really hard to work on something that requires 100% of your concentration while having a percentage of that concentration sucked away by your tools. Anyway, the Touchstream has a purpose and has been very helpful, I'm thankful for that and don't regret the purchase, however if I can get by switching back to a regular keyboard that's what I'm going to do.

Posted by Kimbro Staken