There have been a number of single hand chorded keyboards for niche use cases, or wrist-attached keyboard designs that never went anywhere, etc. It never feels like it should be that hard, keyboards are just a fairly small collection of discrete inputs...
The future is already here if you work in a terminal. This entire set-up fits in a 1 liter dry bag, but gives me about 70% of my desktop productivity as measured by completion time on 10 leetcode medium exercises, alternating first implementation between devices. For tasks requiring less pondering, this probably drops. For tasks requiring a lot of thinking and little rote terminal work, I suspect my productivity is higher due to improved creativity when I'm outdoors. LLms are ever improving this situation, with raw typing speed becoming less important.
The learning curve is significant though. I probably invested 40 hours to reach the 40 wpm and competency with special symbols necessary for real coding work before I was at all productive.
I'm also an exceptional case for a viability study on this mode of working though. I am a very hyperactive person that thrives outside. This means that I do better work when I'm able to work from a trailhead, ripping quick laps on my mountain bike to think through hard problems. I used to do this by parking my campervan with a full desk and starlink at the trailhead. Now I find I can throw my Twiddler and glasses in my MTB pack and ride straight from my house, stopping wherever ideas flow to write and code. I'm able to provide very deep insights on areas of vast complexity for my consulting clients by working this way, where I would lack the focus to retain context and continuity of thought indoors.
Anyway, I've topped out at about 50wpm with the Twiddler, curious to see if folks are able to exceed that with the bubby and may consider a switch!
I was honestly surprised with how effective it is & how usable the cursor control is with the anchoring/axis inversion while walking around. With a 3x5 choc keyboard half in each jacket pocket, the Viture 'sunglasses' on, and my steam deck in my bag, I can comfortably be productive while being out and about walking the hills.
Also, with different ideas like the Bubby, we can probably solve the issue of good portable keyboards for people with big hands. I have Corne split keyboard one at home but feel like i get "claw hands" after a few minutes because of the size.
But these keyboards might be even better.
Just power an RPi with a large power bank in your pockets.
