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Comment by dsego | Hacker News Reader

Not sold on the RSI benefits. See, I bought a Planck, thinking that the ortholinear layout would make sense. But it didn't work really. Maybe I'm just accustomed to the staggered layout, but it just felt too cramped. Besides, I don't think that less movement automatically leads to less strain. In fact it felt like my fingers didn't get to stretch enough, and my wrists were too close for comfort. All in all, the mouse still seems to be the biggest issue for me, especially the micro movements, so I adjust the mouse to have more travel. But in the end the most comfortable experience is a laptop with a decent touchpad, no need to reach for the mouse and the wrists don't move much or at all.

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Careful with the trackpads. My experience with them is my hand is very tense using them and all that tension traveled up my arm into my shoulder and gave me horrible pain. I've since alleviated it by regular intervals switching between trackball and traditional mice.

I had a preonic and felt this way too. Columnar staggered seems to be the most friendly layout, and a split board so that you hands aren't shoved together.

My setup is a split 40% keyboard with a columnar staggered layout (corne), I've got layers for a numpad and mouse emulation keys, and my window manager is i3 and firefox has the tridactyl extension. I very very rarely have to touch a mouse, for the odd times I use it the mouse emulation in QMK is usually enough. I find this is the most comfortable typing experience for me.

But yeah, basically don't discount the benefits of 40% boards because you tried an ortholinear board, I found them uncomfortable too.

Your observation of micro movements of the mouse causing issues is hitting the nail on the head. This movement comes from the wrist and should be avoided.

All pro gamers use a somewhat low sensitivity which forces the movement to come from the forearm instead of the wrist. Higher accuracy isn't the only reason, you'll get chronic wrist pain within a couple of months if the mouse movement comes from your wrist.

I'd recommend at least 20cm/360, better 25+. No accel.

>Higher accuracy isn't the only reason, you'll get chronic wrist pain within a couple of months if the mouse movement comes from your wrist.

Or you could just move the mouse with your fingers. Other positives include requiring much less space and not looking silly flailing around. (My preference is maybe 1–2 cm corner-to-corner, with no wrist related issues a couple decades in; and obviously, mouse acceleration is a great idea.)

IDK, I have my mouse set up so that the full movement range is something like an inch or less; wrist is stationary on table, palm is stationary and doesn't touch mouse, and all movement is done with fingers only. It's kind of the same as working on a touchpad, where also wrist is stationary and everything is done with fingers.

Interesting as I always hated touchpads even after having tried several models of different quality. I'm very happy with my vertical mouse on the other hand. It only performs slightly worse than a normal mouse on very small precision movements but it's much more comfortable and still retains the speed of a mouse vs touchpad.

Have you ever tried using a macbook? That was the conversion point for me.

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