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Comment by sshumaker | Hacker News Reader

I too, encountered crippling RSI pain, and eventually switched to a kinesis keyboard (http://www.kinesis-ergo.com). While the keyboards are crazy expensive, and a bit flaky, they completely cured my carpal tunnel.

The downside is, I'm now stuck hauling around this weird, non-standard keyboard. :)

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Same here. Had nasty pains in both wrists and tried a lot of things until I finally purchased a Kinesis (the current model is this one: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage_pro.htm ) and a Kensington Epert Mouse trackball. I had to learn to type again, but am now faster and completely pain-free for about 6 years.

Very similar experience here; bought myself a Kinesis for home and one for work (I'm sure they'd have paid for it, but I couldn't be bothered). It was quite possibly the best $600 I've ever spent. I don't mouse enough to have yet bothered with the trackball, but perhaps I'll get one to try it out.

The only downside I've found (other than cost, which is a non-issue IMO) is that you get very used to the keyboard and now when I go to a conference room or someplace else with normal keyboards, I might as well be typing with my elbows.

I keep a kinesis at work and a standard keyboard at home. Now I'm so used to using both that I can type just as fast on either one.

I have to put my vote in for the Kinesis Advantage as well. For anyone reading this that might be on the fence about the cost, you will not be disappointed. I was suffering from excruciating pain in my forearms, wrists and fingers. That pain disappeared almost as soon as I started using the Kinesis. For me, the big difference is having a wide split between home rows. This keeps my arms almost completely parallel and alleviates the forearm pain. The key layout is a little funky at first, but what I have realized is that each individual key is positioned exactly where your fingers naturally curl and extend. The other change I made was to add a trackball. I keep the trackball on the left and my regular mouse on the right and switch up usage as often as I can.

I've actually never had any serious problems with my wrists, and sometimes I think that starting playing piano as a young kid, along with my guitar today, and with regular trips to the swimming pool and daily bike commute, helps keeping my wrists strong and pain free.

I've been using a kinesis freestyle keyboard for about a year, and before that a series of regular chepo 102 keys, but the possibility of having my hands apart a longer distance keeps my wrists more relaxed and overall I get a better body posture.

I think most of the problems other people have come from the latter: my elbows are on top of the table, which means my keyboard is farther away than what I see other people using and so I'm in a very relaxed position. The ubiquity of laptop's small keyboards certainly doesn't help either.

I'm partial to the GoldTouch keyboards:

http://www.goldtouch.com/p-133-goldtouch-for-mac-adjustable-...

Because they're close enough to the regular keyboards, while offering both the split (match natural forearm angle) and the tilt (match natural forearm rotation) to better align natural wrist position.

I also like that they ditch the numeric keyboad, so I can put the Kensington ExpertMouse just to the right of the return key and not have to move my hand as far.

I switched to an ErgoLogic keyboard (no longer made but looks like this: http://www.emailbattles.com/2006/04/24/other_aadehidhca_ia/) which had keypads that can be rotated vertically. My wrists were much happier after that. I detailed my efforts battling a bad case of RSI here: http://blog.chromarati.com/2010/04/rsi-my-problem-child-10-t...

I did the exact opposite--one time I came across a very cheap keyboard with the keys wobbly and floppy. Was a relief to my hands.

Since then, as long as I used standalone keyboards I bought cheap keyboards where the situation of my fingertips hitting the key caps was that the caps evaded my fingers a little and required some kind-of adjusting of my finger movements to the individual key once my fingertips hit the key in question.

I guess the added movement helped to relax my fingers.

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