And rearranging some of other keys would be great.
And don't get me started on games, oooooh, how often to I buy a new game and forget what 'm' does? Knife? Grenade? Pickaxe?
If you feel even the slightest bit of pain, that's your body signalling to you 'hey buddy, don't do this'. I was suffering from emacs pinky to the point where my hands were aching hours after leaving my desk. On weekends, my tennis racket grip was significantly weaker and form poorer. Mapping Ctrl to caps, right shift to Esc, and buying a $30 MS Ergonomic keyboard solved my issues. My friends who have had worse issues spent the $300 on a Kinesis (which I had up until then considered to be snake oil) but it seems to have solved their issues entirely (and for $300 it's definitely a cheap investment compared to the opportunity cost of the time invested in physical therapy).
If you're on Linux, you can at the os-level make modal changes. I made the right-alt key move into a different mode, so I effectively get an entirely separate key-mapping when that key is depressed. (E.g., hjkl for me is OS-wide, and sdfg lets me move the cursor. nb. Were I to make this decision again, I'd use Caps as my primary modifier, [ as my secondary, effectively giving me four full keyboard maps. Probably overkill but if I were using something like SolidWorks or Illustrator where having both keyboard and mouse access available often, I'd be experimenting with a setup like that -- keeping my right hand always on the mouse, and left for keyboard shortcuts -- biasing all of the shortcut keys to the left-hand region of the keyboard.)
ErgoDox implements a similar system but on the micro-controller level so you don't even have to putz with modifiers and it's cross OS. I don't have one but I would have bought one if I used a desktop more often, simply due to the trackball-feature (effectively letting one use a mouse without leaving the home-row -- a 'must-have' for me).
One other thing is WorkRave which reminds me to take breaks. This is helpful for my hands, but has been frustrating for getting into the groove of programming.
The only thing vertical mice reduce is wrist movement.
Very true on games. I'd use for this too, and learning. Like someone else mentions a reactive keyboard would have been great when I was learning vi!
Carpal tunnel syndrome is a specific condition where your carpal tunnel constricts around a nerve. RSI is the umbrella term for these types of injuries.
I did it to get control on the caps-lock key, but never conditioned myself to use it.
An appropriate typo, because with this keyboard you can probably map the happy-poo emoji to your shit_key.
(Or if you’re stuck on a standard keyboard, I recommend you try to use the opposite-hand shift key.)