The Writer’s Desk – 4
Just in case the other 3 pics from my desk didn’t convince you that I’m a total geek, I’ll go one more step.
As a writer I find myself constantly editing my work. It sits for 3 days after I finish writing it, then I edit it. If I’m in the middle of writing something big, I usually edit the previous day’s work before I start writing the next day. It gets another edit before it goes to the publisher, and who knows how many edits after that?
Thus I know all the keyboard shortcuts for editing functions.
I once found a keyboard with programmable keys, which was amazing! One-touch cut and paste are my friends, but a ‘save’ button and ‘find’ button were my dream!
Since I’m picky about the squishiness of my keys, too, it was difficult to find a keyboard with the right squish AND programmable keys.
One of the Best Buy employees found me looking bereft over in the keyboard aisle and took pity on me and tried to help. Here’s what he came up with: The Belkin Razer gaming pad.
14 programmable keys and 3 maps. It was intended to be used with online games where you would want to quickly type a series of keystrokes. So you write a macro for the keys you want, then program it to a specific button. You can speed it up to super-human, too. No waiting for the program to type out the keys. One touch and Blattow! there it is.
Yup – I jacked it for typing. I have one layout dedicated to all my crazy logins and passwords, but one whole layout belongs to writing. I have ‘replace’, ‘find’, whole word delete and highlight both backward and forward! Also ‘copy’ ‘paste’ ‘cut’ ‘print’ ‘save’ ‘close’ and ‘italics’
I haven’t yet figured out ‘highlight’ but I did learn how to toggle back and forth between screens! So I can pull up my editor’s comments then toggle over to my copy and insert any changes without picking up my mouse/pen.
I know it makes me look geeky, but since I wasn’t avoiding that anyway I have decided to embrace it!
I had an older version of he gamepad and got this newer one for Christmas. The older one got demoted to my travelling laptop set-up. Yes, I have two of them.
But this is pure writer’s heaven!
- AJ -
