This morning I switched on my monitor, noticed the LCD screens of my newly built mechanical keyboard--the Ergodox Infinity--go from "breathe" to a greeting with the
qmk logo from its freshly flashed firmware, and then my monitor greeted me with its Emacs session from yesterday.
Even though it was not my original intent when switching on and plugging in, I found that I couldn't resist continuing to type up the next logical part of a keymap I started working on for a different mechanical keying device: My long-finished but never customized RAMA m10.
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| Ergodox Infinity (center) RAMA m10 (top right) |
As I finished joyfully typing the rest of LAYER1, on to LAYER2, it made me think of a story I once read about Nietzsche and his typewriter. I remember the striking thing about it, and probably the reason it occurred to me again in this moment, was how much Nietzsche wrote about using the typewriter and how he thought about how our tools and techniques affect and influence our art and our work.
Delightfully, a web search turned up several articles about Nietzsche and his new mechanical typing machine. I have some other things to do right now, followed by an appointment, but hopefully I'll come back later and write some more. For now, here are some of the stories and discussions I enjoyed the most so far:
I had forgotten that one of the reasons Nietzsche was so pleased with his mechanical writing tool is that he was suffering from "half blindness" and headaches along with demanding deadlines from publishers. He even said that either writing or reading for 20 minutes or more would cause his hands and head to hurt and his vision to suffer. So, part of it wasn't just the speed at which he could write, but it was almost like a
prosthetic: He could produce manuscripts that his editors could read while this could have been difficult or impossible if he had to scrawl it all out by hand. The other subtle point I missed or didn't remember was that while Nietzsche punched on the Hansen Writing Ball he found that he could do it without looking, so without reading and straining his eyes, whereas writing by hand was much more visually demanding.
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