Got a Hash Key!
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 04:10PM 
One of my golden rules for developers is “Make yourself a nice place to work”. Of course I don’t always apply this to myself. For the last few years I’ve been using keyboards that I bought from the US which don’t have the proper keyboard setup for my machines. I’ve written a whole bunch of stuff on C# development using a keyboard that doesn’t have a proper mapping for the # key. Things are even worse when I use my MacBook, that doesn’t even have a # anywhere – I end up using block copy to get one, even though there is a strange “Picnic site + something or other” combination that you can use.
Anyhoo, I’ve just managed to get hold of a couple of bendy keyboards that actually have a # key on them in the correct place. My one worry now is how I’m going to get used to them.
FYI I prefer the Microsoft Bendy keyboards. These help a lot with things like RSI (at least for me). If you get any kind of wrist ache after a long bout of typing I’d strongly suggest investigating them. One of my big worries is that they might stop making them, which would be annoying. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment, you can still get the one I like, albeit for a lot more than I paid….
Life
Reader Comments (4)
I also replaced my standard mouse with a Evoluent Vertical Mouse ( http://www.evoluent.com/vm3.html ). The combination was brilliant, and the RSI symptoms have completely gone away. Brilliant combination!!!
Typically we use US keyboards in NZ (because of the dollar sign since 1967), but on both my PC keyboards and my Macbook and iMac (things have got a bit out of hand with computer buying over the last few years...need more guitars) the hash key is just SHIFT+3.
So now I'm starting to wonder if maybe our keyboards are a bit different after all?