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I used Karabiner for a month after getting hit by a car and breaking my right wrist. I couldn't use that hand at all whilst it healed.

I had Karabiner remap my keyboard to half-qwerty, so that I could type entirely using my left hand on the left side of the keyboard only. A modifier key would switch it into "mirror mode" so that all the left-side keys would be remapped to right-side keys. Fun stuff!



Once you regained use of your right hand did it take any time to get back to full typing speed using both hands?

How close to your two hand WPM did you achieve with your left hand alone?


The biggest obstacle was the swelling in the wrist after surgery. I had to keep it elevated for quite a long time, and it would throb and be painful when I lowered it to the keyboard. That passed gradually over 2 months. The finger dexterity never left, the moments I held my hand there I could type at ~80% speed without problems from early on.

With just my left hand, I could only manage more like 20%, which felt very very slow to me. The bottleneck with half-querty was the modifier key, which I had to hit very often to switch layouts. If you could move that to something else, that layout could speed up much more.

Had I been out of action much longer, I might have tried some kind of custom one-handed chording setup instead.


I'm adding my comment here to "pile on" and say that I'm very interested in the answers to these questions, too.

I tried to learn a one handed keyboard back in college (Matias Half Keyboard) just to see if there was any benefit to always having one hand on the kb and one on the mouse.

I never did find out; I gave up learning how to type with one hand after a month and sent the keyboard back.


I had a bike accident which prevented me from typing with my left hand for a couple weeks (dislocated shoulder, broken finger). I wish this were around at the time! I had looked into physical half-qwerty keyboards, but I couldn't afford one.

I ended up hobbling together a simple app that switched two full system key layouts while holding the spacebar, more or less mimicking the half-qwerty behavior. It was my first Mac app, and it was pretty crashy, but it kept me working for those couple weeks.

I wanted to open source it, but ceased work when I was able to type with both hands again, because I knew half-qwerty was patented and didn't want to take that risk.

Really glad there's an easier solution now!


Just had to put left arm in a brace and would like to hear results too.




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