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Comment by ateng | Hacker News Reader

As a developer who also has cubital tunnel syndrome, having keyboards that places commonly use modifier keys [0] on your thumbs, such as Kinesis advantage or Ergodox, helps reducing the fatigue and symptoms immensely.

[0] it is called Emacs pinkies for a reason, and yes, my CTS is totally emacs’s fault as well.

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It's pretty telling that RMS had to stop coding because CTS.

Edit: Not carpal tunnel syndrome, as he explains in https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

"""In the mid 90s I had bad hand pain, so bad that most of the day I could only type with one finger. The FSF hired typists for me part of the day, and part of the day I tolerated the pain. After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my keyboard. I switched to a keyboard with lighter key pressure and the problem mostly went away.

My problem was not carpal tunnel syndrome: I avoid that by keeping my wrists pretty straight as I type. There are several kinds of hand injuries that can be caused by repetitive stress; don't assume you have the one you heard of."""

  > The FSF hired typists for me part of the day...

That must have been a job from hell, probably went through a lot of them!

Manual transcription is still a thing today. Stenographers being one of the more well-known examples.

Stenotype keyboards are way better from a RSI point of view, though. Unfortunately, no one has come up with the "theories" or systems that would allow use of them for specialized input like programming.

Plover is often used for this, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRFKZGWrmrM

http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

I've seen a few conference presentations about using steno for programming. It does seem to involve building your own library of commands, but people seem to have done it and use it daily.

Had pain a few years ago, switched to Ergo 4000's everywhere and have never had any pain since - depending on desk height I'll use the front riser but generally don't need it.

I love them so much I have spare new-in-box ones stashed as a hedge for the day they stop selling them.

They are about the cheapest good quality ergo keyboard I could find.

Not to flame-bait, but this is actually one of the reasons I've doubled down on vim. I like that I can function perfectly fine with one finger, I even managed to write a bunch of code using vim on my phone, and was surprised how well it translated.

You could definitely set up toggled modifier keys and do the same with emacs, FWIW.

ye, modifier keys suck. This is why I prefer snake-case over the other casings because it needs no modifier key.

What languages do you use?

Also along those lines: what keyboard layout? I've never seen a (QWERTY) layout where underscore isn't a shift-level key.

The key issue (pun intended) with normal keyboard is that you use your weakest fingers for ALL of your modifier keys. By shifting that responsibility to your thumbs you greatly reduce your little fingers’ workload (and hence chance of CTS)

Switching to a planck keyboard would let you customize all the positions of buttons for less strain.

The planck keyboard is a great keyboard, but possibly on par with the worst in terms of ergonomics.

Ergodox, Diverge, Keyboard.io, really any split key keyboard does worlds for keeping hands straight and are fully programmable to very high degrees.

Am I the only one who just keeps their hands/wrists straight on a regular unsplit keyboard? I've always naturally done this and never had any problems with strain.

The best way to describe it is that the home keys aren't ASDF, but more like WEFV with my forearm angled so it's straight from elbow to fingertip. This exaggerates the effect but demonstrates it clearly; the real home positions are more like intermediate points between keys.

Yeah, same. I find keeping my fingers on the home keys makes me twist my wrists outwards, which gets uncomfortable pretty fast. I mostly try to minimise wrist action in general.

I've actually had a Planck EZ for a few weeks now and I agree it's probably not very ergonomic for the classic qwerty touch typist, or at least not much better than a normal keyboard barring the programmability.

But since I don't do that anyway I find the keyboard to be pretty nice in terms of customisability and avoiding stretching.

In general I feel my hands are used most naturally in close proximity to each other (at roughly abdomen height) so I'm drawn to small keyboards with lots of modifier keys. A spherical keyboard would be pretty interesting to try out.

On my keyboard - which is.. I don't want to say 'full size', because maybe it's '80%' or whatever, but it's a regular external keyboard with numpad - f & j are centre to centre 60mm apart.

If I outstretch my arms, straight, my index fingers are pretty much in line with my shoulders.

So no, when I use my regular unsplit keyboard my hands/wrists are not straight, because my shoulders are not 60mm apart..? Am I missing something?

I believe GP was talking about elbow-hand being completely straight. That would make sense if their elbows are on arm rests or some such thing.

It does sound interesting. I did type this comment trying it, and it was pretty comfortable, with the exception of my right wrist. That being said, I've got kind of weird seating set up.

Oh.. then I'm not sure what we're doing differently, or what the difference is in hardware, but my arms/hands are straight from elbow to fingertip when I rest on 'home row' 'adsf'/'jkl;' - if I change to 'wefv' it's a significant contortion, if that's what it looks/feels like for some people using 'asdf' then I understand the problem and am not surprised they don't put up with it!

If I stick my elbow way out I can make 'wefv' as natural to me as 'asdf'. So I suppose either my elbows are more tucked in, or my keyboard's wider ('dfgh' for example contorts the other way, and analgously to 'wefv', 'rthn', or better but less analogously 'erth', is more comfortable there).

Yes, your last paragraph is my natural position, with the elbows farther out. 'wefv' exaggerates the effect to demonstrate; the real position is about halfway between 'wefv' and 'sdfv'.

I have a planck keyboard, but I think it's small size isn't fantastic for hand position. I think I may eventually purchase an ergodox ez to get better hand positions.

The ErgoDox already allows arbitrary repositioning of the keys.

The Planck keyboard is cramped. It's worse than a cheap Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.

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