About twelve years ago I started an experiment. I’d been typing reasonably fast with three to five fingers, but constantly looking between keyboard and screen, correcting as I went. My goal was finally switching to a proper ten-finger system. Not the antiquated QWERTZ though — NEO, which was still quite new then.
The idea behind NEO keyboard layout: fingers should travel minimal distances, saving your wrists. I kept getting repetitive strain injuries, so switching to NEO felt like a major investment in my future.
Three months of pure hell. Everything slower, more laborious. Fortunately the global financial crisis was hitting and my second son had just been born. Not much work anyway, so I could stumble from one typing error to the next.
Over the years I wrote more and more in NEO. But kept falling back to the old system. Sometimes I had to use keyboards on computers that didn’t support NEO. Since I worked heavily with shortcuts that somehow wouldn’t activate in NEO, I used QWERTZ more again.
My first nine months here in Australia, I only had my iPad — no NEO keyboard layout option. I’d almost forgotten NEO and was back to my old three-to-many-finger rhythm.
During the first lockdown I moved my work setup to our garden shed. The WiFi signal just reaches there, and on the rough wooden table sits a monitor, mechanical keyboard, and Raspberry Pi. In the shed I do nothing but write. Only VS Code installed on the Pi, where I write my texts in Markdown — and in NEO.
Recently I bought an old refurbished ThinkPad for $180, installed Ubuntu on it. On the ThinkPad I also type with the wonderful keyboard (exactly why I bought an old ThinkPad x220) using NEO. In my other office in the house sits my Windows machine, previously my main computer.
Since Windows and NEO don’t play nicely together, I only use that computer for video conferences and work that isn’t writing-intensive. Otherwise I write almost all texts on my ThinkPad or Raspberry Pi in the shed.
That was a long introduction to the title. But here’s where I connect the dots: I’ve gotten used to NEO again and make only a few errors, which I correct blindly. I feel when I haven’t pressed a key properly. I hit backspace and correct.
Annoying habit, because it pulls me out of the writing flow.
Usually it’s just a typo, wrong letter sequence that sorts itself out quickly when I run spell-check — part of my definition of done — over it later. So I’ve resolved to accept the spelling errors and not look back. Backspace isn’t banned outright, but I want to use it only in extreme emergencies. When something goes really wrong, for instance.
Since I trust my typing skills and myself, focusing more on the typing itself, I’m faster and more accurate on the keyboard.
We should forget the backspace key in life too. We can’t go back, can’t correct anything anymore. Maybe we should live with things not being perfect sometimes and just continue, because life is perfect as it is and small flaws don’t influence life as much as we and others convince ourselves they do.
So: just keep writing and keep living. Without the backspace key.
This post first appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, where I’ve been writing since 1997 — back when the internet still had that new-car smell. An AI assistant helped with the translation under my supervision. If something reads a bit odd, blame the Denglish in my head.