Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
95 comments
·June 3, 2025lburton
This will depend a bit on the person but for me when I injured my right arm I found that my touch typing muscle memory worked surprisingly well with a toggle key to flip the left side of my keyboard to become a mirrored version of the right side. Each finger was still hitting the same key like it would if I was using my right hand to hit the key but on my left hand. This was fairly easy to accomplish on a QMK firmware keyboard (I was also already typing on a split keyboard so that might be part of the reason it was fairly easy to adjust). See https://docs.qmk.fm/features/swap_hands#swap-hands-action
idahoduncan
I have this set up using kmonad[1], and the following config. Many punctation marks are obviously missing, but I'm sure they could be added with a little thought. The mirrored layout is toggled by holding the space key.
(defalias
lhs (tap-next-release spc (layer-toggle ytrewq)))
(deflayer ytrewq
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
bspc 0 9 8 7 6 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ p o i u y _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
ret ; l k j h _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
lsft / . , m n _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _)
behnamoh
kmonad:
written in Haskell
config in Lisp
idahoduncan
It's also apparently cross-platform. Great project!
fouronnes3
I am low key thinking about trying this without any disability, as a way of always keeping the right hand on the mouse.
bravesoul2
I like the idea. Don't you love those words like "creed" or "scare" that can be typed with one hand!
Valodim
Stewardess ;)
ahonhn
I stopped using a mouse when I moved from desktop to laptop computer because I found the touchpad is so much more convenient for keeping my hand near the keyboard. However, doing this for over 20 years means I'm now very stuck in my habit of needing touchpads with real buttons. All my attempts to get used to the awful buttonless modern touchpads have been an absolute nightmare so far :-(
barbazoo
Foot pedal maybe? Or maybe a dedicated mouse button.
komali2
Does your usual computer activity require a lot of mouse work? Ten years ago I went down this path when my coworker caught me adding bindings to my mouse buttons. He sat me down at his machine and showed me vim wasn't just an old fart text editor and that the bindings can be used in other editors.
Ofc if you're not doing text based work this wouldn't apply.
faizshah
I had the same experience, my typing speed with two hands is 90-120 but with one hand i can still get 50-70. The hard part is punctuation but with AI these days you could try just prompting and let the AI deal with syntax for you.
haiku2077
Right, you could run your text through an LLM that adds punctuation and then fix up the result manually. Would probably save time + fatigue
bravesoul2
That's a fast speed. I practice to get to 60 then said well, that's good enough!
bryanlarsen
Yes, I was just going to make this suggestion. If it's a temporary problem, you probably don't want a solution that requires extensive retraining to use. A mirrored keyboard takes advantage of existing brain wiring.
autohotkey layout: https://github.com/hanmindev/mirrorboard
xkb layout: https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...
jfengel
In a quick experiment, I found that utterly baffling. On zero practice, it was much faster for me to type with just my left hand. (Though it requires me to keep looking at the keyboard, because I'm leaving the home position.)
arjvik
Randall Munroe talks about exactly this:
https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...
MeIam
Wouldn't think that they could use their voice. I had a serious shoulder injury and a surgery an all that. At first I tried my other arm but it would get tired. Voice conversion to text works really well nowadays. Voice to text worked for me.
rowla
One-handed typer here – well, one hand and one finger, and it’s been like this for all my life. Your friend may want to consider text macro tools such as Keyboard Maestro for macOS. There are many others, but KM will also launch apps and do other magic for me just by typing two or three letters. Create a list of frequently used words or segments, define a generic expansion key (in my case #) that doesn’t require a modifier. I have more than 1000 of these macros, and it really helps with all those long words in my native German. Dictation may also help, although I find that it leads my thoughts in different directions when I see words appear on the screen as I speak.
donatj
My dad has the same situation, one arm and one finger on said arm - the beefiest pinky you've ever seen.
He does most of his typing these days with voice-to-text on his Android phone, and he's pretty adept with it. Otherwise he gets by pretty well with a standard Apple keyboard. He's not winning any speed awards but he does alright.
kldg
I severely burned most of dominant hand about a decade ago in a grease fire. One-handing the whole keyboard was fine enough (70-100wpm to 15-20wpm) that I didn't bother looking for a better solution, but I was able to use the injured hand enough to press modifier keys as needed. Unless they plan on working while recovering, I'd try out not making any explicit modifications. Good excuse to catch up on movie-watching.
etoxin
Arm amputee programmer here. There are some wild hardware solutions out there.
What I found best was
- a standard qwerty keyboard (I didn't want to be restricted to custom keyboards)
- A learning program called Five Finger Typist. https://www.spectronics.com.au/product/five-finger-typist-2-...
Basically I'm hybrid touch typing. Because I cover the whole keyboard as I type the chance for error increases the longer I type. I quickly glance to know where i'm aligned.
In hindsight I should have learnt to use the F and J notches more.
I have extensively remapped my IDE shortcuts to be easier to trigger.
colgandev
First of all, condolences to your friend and cool of you to look into this.
Back in the day I switched to Dvorak and came across the "one handed Dvorak layout. This may be what you are referring to. I haven't tried it much but those layouts could be a temporary solution. I found Qwerty to be a lot easier to type one handed straight up because Dvorak tries to alternate hands between keys.
I recently discovered Talon, an open source app for voice control of basically everything on a machine that requires no typing at all. I saw some people are using it even if they can use their hands, as a power tool. It appears to be fully Python scriptable and also gives you some nice speech to text abilities too.
It allows you to specify a bunch of keywords for typing symbols and it looks like some people can do full coding quite quickly.
Perhaps this injury could be an opportunity to try something like this and become more powerful than before?
Best of luck and recovery to your friend.
janice1999
Talon is not open source as far as I know. It's freeware with Patreon early access and support. The community plugins cover a wide range of applications and are easy to modify. I also found their Slack good for discussing accessibility options like gaze tracking. It looks like development has slowed significantly but the developer recently rewrote the core in Rust.
colgandev
Ah, that's my mistake, thanks!
jonah-archive
I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html
sillystuff
I'll second the steep learning curve for the twiddler. I never got up to a typing speed on it that was not horribly, frustratingly, slow. But, I only needed it for a couple months.
Like OP's relative, I also could not use my dominant arm, nor have my arm in a position that would allow typing one handed on a regular keyboard. The twiddler was the only commercially available option that I was able to find that would allow me to type in this state. So, another recommendation of twiddler, but with the caveat that the original had several warts, and while they appear to be redesigned, they may still suffer from some of them.
The velcro strap to hold it to the hand, combined with the shape of the keyboard, allowed it to shift position while typing making it harder to use. Photos of the current models show they have a different shape now. Maybe this is less of a problem now? They are also wireless now, so there isn't a wire constantly pulling it out of position whenever you move.
The keyboard markings rubbed off completely after only a few weeks of use on my OG twiddler. Hopefully they have worked that manufacturing issue out for the current models.
ggerules
I've also used an early version of the twiddler. It is a very nice keyboard with mouse integration. It seems they have upgraded the product.
neilv
Thirded on Twiddler. I didn't use it myself, but I worked with some people who were very productive with it. One was even said to have written their dissertation laying down, with a Twiddler and a HUD.
Separate from that, when I've temporarily injured one hand/arm or the other, typing on a QWERTY keyboard wasn't that slow for me. Especially if I typed all-lowercase. Though my normal typing style has two hands moving around the keyboard a bit; I don't know whether traditional home-row typists would fine one-handed more difficult.
(Just be careful when Web searching about this topic at work, since it's bumping into an old euphemism joke on Reddit.)
kace91
Any specifics on the kind of typing they need?
If it’s human text (as opposed to code), one handed swipe style typing on a smartphone can get really fluid, and it’s relatively easy to get for someone who is a touch typer. I’d check on ways to use that as computer input if needed.
synack
Last year I had an injury that left me one handed for a few months. I managed to hunt-and-peck my way to a patched QMK firmware for an Adafruit Macropad I had lying around. I set it up with the artsey.io layout and set the cheatsheet as my desktop wallpaper.
I found the Learning Artsey book from Discord helpful and managed to get up to 15 WPM in about a week with regular practice. Still quite tedious for coding, but good enough for emails and IRC.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128
https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/qmk_firmware/tree/artsey_ma...
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/artseyio/artsey/main/layou...
janice1999
Have you considered voice dictation and control? There are good commercial solutions and even some free ones (like https://talonvoice.com/ - edit: not open source but has lots of community plugins). I used it for a while when I was recovering from hand problems. I was surprised how easy it was to learn. It helped a lot for tasks like navigating windows, writing emails etc. There are even voice coding applications now (https://www.cursorless.org/).
PAPPPmAc
I have a long fascination with weird input devices, owing partly to a predisposition to fine joint problems, and Chorders are always both super interesting in theory and kind of weird in practice, going all the way back to the Engelbart/SRI 5-key Keyset that was carried forward to the Alto.
Of the ones I've played with, I find the 7-key kind (4 fingers and 3 thumb positions) to be the most appealing, and I don't see them mentioned in the thread. Infogrip has sadly discontinued their commercial BAT offering, the "Spiffchorder" family ( https://www.chorder.org/wiki/doku.php/start ) use the same chord-set and are designed to be cheap and easy construction - I've made a few in different physical arrangements. I'm too qwerty habituated and never got _completely_ comfortable, but I've been up to tolerable a couple times.
My "normal" typing is mostly on conventional splits (Kinesis makes make some nice off-the-shelf options that just split and tent), largely to avoid shoulder issues. I recently tried a ortholinear split and... I'm pretty convinced they really don't have meaningful benefits.
hackshack
A keyboard with the keys pulled and replaced in the Dvorak "LH" (left hand) layout might be worth a try. Years ago, I had a hand injury for several weeks and this got me through. Took about a week or two to type reasonably well. It remaps the number row to one side for maximum use of the keys on the strong side.
August Dvorak developed these "LH" and "RH" layouts for amputees. The layouts are well thought out IMHO. It feels like typing on a numeric keypad.
innocentoldguy
I used Dvorak when I injured my dominant hand. It took me about two weeks to feel comfortable with it. My hand healed a long time ago, but I still use Dvorak (the two handed version mostly) because I think it is easier than Qwerty. I highly recommend this solution.
A relative of mine recently suffered a serious injury to their dominant (right) arm, which will have a long recovery period (likely several months). Ideally finger movement will be restored sooner, but even if so it might not be comfortable to keep the injured arm in an ergonomic typing position.
So I wanted to prepare some options for one-handed typing that they can review. At first glance, it looks like solutions fall into one of three categories:
- Trainings on how to effectively use a keyboard with one hand
- Keyboard remappings on existing hardware to use alternative key layouts that favor the keys on the left side
- Specialty keyboards that are intended to be used with one hand. Some of these seem promising but also shockingly expensive.
Any thoughts on what solutions you've seen work / you might pursue in a similar situation?