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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

Dual arm monitors to free up lots of space on my desk and more easily hold displays at eye level so I don’t get pain.

A split ortho homebrew keyboard (helix) that I can program with qmk so that I have shift esc enter space and special keys on other layers right where I want them. Or a dedicated Ctrl-a key for tmux. It virtually eliminated my pain. The OLED screens are useless though and I retrospect I should just have skipped them. I should also have put the two arduinos in it on sockets right away because that USB port will of course break and it’s a pain to desolder it.

A “clearly superior technology” (CST) trackball in the middle of the split keyboard that I try and use most with my left hand to give my right hand a break. It’s chunky, well made, uses standard pool balls as the trackball, and can be easily taken apart for cleaning or servicing. Wasn’t cheap though.

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I tried getting a couple arms for my desk, but they required 8 inches of clearance behind the desk for the monitors to be at a reasonable distance from my face and my desk is backed up to a wall

Ah yes, i always get deep desks for myself so the arm can be flush with the wall because the monitors need to stick out further to be at arms length.

Just mount the pole off-center, then you can get around the clearance problem somewhat. I only have one monitor mounted centrally, and my laptop to the side on the second arm. The desk is almost flush to the wall at 2cm (~1 inch) and the monitor and laptop are around 15cm (~6 inches) away from the wall.

Yeah, I had 3x 32" monitors mounted on arms (one twin arm and one single arm) on a desk pushed almost right up to the wall this way. The arms can go sideways in one direction and then sideways in the other right behind the monitor, as long as the base is not centred.

This is my problem also. I have a shallow desk (2') and then the mount intrudes the displays enough that I can't push my laptop back or tilt it as far as I sometimes need. Further, the riser isn't tall enough so my screens hang about an inch below my laptop display.

If I was more confident that my work area wouldn't change in the future, I'd try an extendable wall mount. I probably should do that anyway.

What kind of trackball?

Clearly Superior Technologies (CST) is the brand :) After a quick search, I think they're being manufactured by a different company now: https://xkeys.com/xkeys/trackballs.html

I've been using mine for 9 years, I just wish they would make a bluetooth one which can switch between mulitple devices like my keyboard does.

I did email them asking but they said they had no plans to do this.

Yes it seems like they’re set on a proven design.

I used to use a USB hub and have the two cables next to one another on my desk, manually unplugging replugging it to transfer keyboard and mouse at once. With USB extenders so both machines have their plus right next to another.

But I saw in this thread there are USB switchers so maybe that’s a solution?

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