Comment by Cannabat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cannabat | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure if taking regular breaks and doing exercises can fully mitigate the RSI and discomfort/pain that drives many to use ergonomic keyboards and input devices.

Personally, my wrists start to hurt after only an hour or two of use of a "normal" keyboard and mouse. It doesn't matter if I've spent the previous 3 months offline doing yoga (getting very thorough full-body movement) or totally absorbed in some computer-y project - "normal" input devices hurt! My shoulders and back are more tolerant, but eventually they start to ache too.

It's likely I didn't take care of myself properly earlier in life, but using a split keyboard and tilted thumb-operated trackball mean I can continue coding without nerve pain.

To be clear, the goal is not exactly to move less - it's to keep the wrists and shoulders in a neutral, less-stressful position.

> Personally, my wrists start to hurt after only an hour or two of use of a "normal" keyboard and mouse.

IME, what has worked for me is to make the interval of the "regular breaks" on the order of one hour. The break isn't much, just get up, grab a glass of water or whatever, moving my arms and wrists a bit, then sit back down.

> To be clear, the goal is not exactly to move less - it's to keep the wrists and shoulders in a neutral, less-stressful position.

I fully agree with this.

The only hardware issue that couldn't be solved with this approach and required a new keyboard was the wrists-angled-up situation imposed by a 2012-era Apple keyboard (don't know if they've evolved since).

I've always refused to type for longer than a few minutes on keyboards that don't at least lay flat on the table. And for the keyboards I use every day (when sitting at my home or work desk) I've insisted on keyboards with a wrist rest and no number pad. I have a TKL one at home, and I think even that may be too large. My "75%" (laptop style, with the arrows under Enter and HOME / END / etc in a column to the right of Enter) is perfect.

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