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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. My wrists are mostly good, but my knuckles aren't always, thanks to the early-onset osteoarthritis that comes with the family hands. I expect there will come days when it would be, if not absolutely necessary, then at least a lot less painful to work this way than with a keyboard, so I'm glad to know there's a viable option.

I'm glad you wrote it up, and that it got to the front page here strikes me as HN working as intended.

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This stuff is really worth of taking the effort to learn at least once.

I didn't actually write this up per se :P Technically, I dictated it and there's probably some gnarly typos with homophones in there that I haven't totally eliminated because it was a bit of a fire and forget piece, where I was just dumping my thoughts on a topic.

I mean technically you wouldn't have written it up even with a keyboard, so... :D

And yeah, even notwithstanding the massive accessibility benefit, I can see use in learning it just for the sake of a new lens on how to navigate code. Sort of the same reason I'm looking forward to the big Emacs 29 update on all my machines around the end of the year - among other things, I get to find out firsthand whether I'm as excited as I should be for first class tree-sitter, or not excited enough.

But for VS Code folks, this is already right there and I can't imagine not wanting to play around at least a bit with it and see what it can do.

I only noticed one, near the end: "get led into" -> "get let into".

I'll fix that, thanks!

Curious, how did "received" end up with multiple spellings then?

that's one of the like 5 words I can't spell reliably, and I did do some typo fixes with my keyboard.

Have you considered strength training? Strengthening your grip can lessen the pain of arthritis in the hands. Exercises like deadlifts and bent over barbell rows will give you a very strong grip. (People assume it's all about the big muscles but grip strength is actually one of the main limiting factors for deadlift progression!)

If you struggle with deadlifts, a farmer walk with something heavy works wonders as well. I can wake up with my hands aching, get some walks in, and the pain is down to 25% or so. Inflammation feels reduced, hand moves more fluidly, and it doesn’t come back quickly unless it’s very damp and cold.

Farmer walks are amazing and I encourage people to do them more. Deadlifts are awesome for all kinds of reasons too; walks are definitely not a replacement, just a great alternative as far as hands go.

That seems to have helped me a lot. I developed chronic pain in my knuckles from typing. I've had it for about seven years.

I started strength training this year, for other reasons. Using a rowing machine irritated my fingers, so I thought I'd have to avoid things like deadlifts and pullups. But I started using heavy clubs, which really work the grip but with the force pulling in a different direction. I've at least doubled my grip strength with those, and my fingers are a lot better now in general. (Now I'm doing deadlifts and rows too.)

Other things that helped before this:

- Switching to mech keyboards, and training myself to type without bottoming out the keys. When the problem first developed it was so bad I worried my career was ending. Mech keyboards fixed that.

- Holding my hands in ice water for ten minutes each, once a day. First two minutes are super painful, then the rest isn't bad. After a while you get used to it and the first part is all right too. That was more for acute relief when it was getting bad, and it made a huge difference. I've seen at least one study saying it works, too.

I have written about it here before, but I also suffer from pretty bad arthritis in my knuckles, I am only 37 and this has been the case for almost a decade.

After trying many things, the thing that helped me the most was switching to a super low pressure rubber dome keyboard and typing softly. I use a Sun Type 7 but really any keyboard with super low pressure keys would probably do.

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