Hacker News Reader

Comment by kw71 | Hacker News Reader

I felt the same thing until after some years I started getting terrible pain in my wrists. It was the IBM keyboard I prized so much and held on to. Then I found some cherry keyboards in the trash in a pile of Point of Sale discards. Now for ten years, "garbage" as been the most prominent and stable feature of my workspace.

View on HN

I don’t want to sound like Apple but you are probably using it wrong. I’ve seen people get used to typing on flat chicklet laptop keyboards and then taking those habits over to the proper old style keyboard.

An IBM keyboard is not meant for a typist that keeps their palms resting on desk while slumping in their chair. It’s meant for you to sit up straight and hover your palms over the keyboard.

If you type like that then it seems effortless and the keys feel light and you’ll never have any wrist issues. Reaching the numpad area is also easy because your hand is already in the air. A proper typing technique is like jiu jitsu—it leverages the weight of your entire hand and arm to assist with the key presses. Your hand is loose and mobile, so nerve compression is less likely. On a chicklet keyboard your fingers are mobile but the palms are “glued” in place. This encourages lots of “flexing” the fingers to reach farther placed keys, instead of just moving your entire hand in the “hover” typist approach. My guess is this creates ideal conditions for nerve compression.

The pain is good thing because it lets you know you’re doing something wrong. Using keyboard with low actuation force is just masking the problem. If you do something wrong with less force you will not feel any pain immediately. Same thing as people using shitload of fluffy pillows instead of fixing their sleeping posture. If you sleep on floor it might be uncomfortable at first but it also forces you into better posture, instead of making it bearable to hold a wrong one.

You do sound a bit like Apple in the sense that you posit that your way is the right way but you don't really justify it with solid scientific arguments. My technique is actually pretty close to the one you describe (my hands hover on top of the keyboard, although my elbows rest on the table) but some of your arguments sound off to me, in particular:

>A proper typing technique is like jiu jitsu—it leverages the weight of your entire hand and arm to assist with the key presses.

Given the relatively high typing frequency a decent typist reaches and the fact that you generally start typing the next key before you're done with the current one I can't really see how that would work. My palms are mostly static while I type, just hovering gently above the keyboard. They do translate a bit on the horizontal plane but I definitely don't really lower them to drive the key down. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but if you reach a somewhat decent typing speed of a few hundred keys per seconds that makes for a pretty spastic vibration with your whole hand.

Also I think it's a bit condescending to assume that every people who ends up with RSI or similar problems were "doing something wrong".

If you have elbows on desk you are probably not sitting up straight. Anyway you are wrong, when the elbow is free you can put your weight into typing. Just try it. It’s a bit of a flick of the wrist for weak fingers and slight up and down movement with your bicep, it’s not a lot but it translates to a lot of force. It’s the same principle as using your hips to put a punch in boxing or martial arts.

When your palms or elbows are resting all those movements are limited and your hands quickly tense up.

Here’s an explanation of the RSI issue and flat palms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pryYfH9j5o however their fix is not great and it’s not a sustainable position

EDIT: Here’s a quick sketch: http://svgur.com/s/7e6 The fingers are below the palms not at the same level, but this is only natural if your back is straight. Arm should bend at close to 90°

EDIT2: Or look at this piano posture video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InqmH-o1cX0 especially at 6:06 mark.

Whatever the reason, I think it was the high actuation force of the IBM keyboard. I don't really slouch. I did not hover my arms and I really don't want to all the time, but I had a pretty good wrist pillow, two "Sun The Network is the Computer" pads adhered together, so my angles probably weren't as bad as you imagine.

Any kind of wrist “support” will severely limit your movement range. If you don’t slouch it should be easy to just bring the keyboard closer to your body, to the edge of the desk. I’ve made a sketch in case it helps: http://svgur.com/s/7e6

Or see this piano posture video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InqmH-o1cX0

Around 6:03–6:06 you can see the type of finger flexing chiclet keyboards and wrist pads encourage.

Sorry to hear about these problems, but if 'garbage' works for you, then that's all that matters. I swap between my model M (for my Windows 10 PC) and a 'garbage' low end USB generic keyboard, and find both work fine, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if the model M wasn't available.

I don't know if this has something to do with my good fortune (so far!) of no keyboard-related RSI issues, but I was trained as a classical piano player from a very young age. It could be the posture lessons I learned - sometimes at the wrong end of a wooden ruler! - back then have transferred across to my money-making keyboard skills.

I used to play the drums and I did not have wrist issues so I figured I would be less affected by RSI from using a keyboard. It could have made it worse though.

Having no win/meta keys on the IBM keyboard actually led me to try different devices but IBM felt better than all those things so I kept coming back and dealing without the keys. I was very happy with the IBM keyboard for a very long time.

Before I found the POS discard Cherrys, I think I had only heavily used the Cherry MX on a Wyse terminal, but I wasn't really thinking about it at the time. The G80-8200 with clears were a great find with only noticeable wear on the num-pad enter key. The keyboard itself stores the setup and handles all the extra keys, not software on the host, so that's especially great for me as I have some macros to control the kvm switch.

There are a lot of keyboards that some people really like but I think are terrible and preferred the IBM over them. Sun type 4, type 5; DEC LK201, LK401; Keytronic come to mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com