Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective

From a quick search, it seems piano players do suffer from a high incidence of RSI (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12611474/, which also correlates it with smaller hands, i.e. more stretching).

I also started learning piano at 4 and played daily until 25 or so. I still play other instruments but with different movements.

I am 35 and still have no hint of RSI or carpal tunnel (touch wood). I had a scare for a bit but turned out my mouse was just in a dumb position.

YMMV but the above informs my crank belief of 'move heaps, varied as much as possible, get strong fingers and forearms' being a viable approach.

N.B. A note on the bottoming out stuff: this was again inspired by my piano teacher who taught a technique of imagining pressing the piano keys 'through' the base, further than they move in reality. This was combined with the weight coming from your entire arm, fore, bicep, and shoulder, not from your fingers.

N.B.B. If anyone knows input methods that take this to extremes I'd love to know. I.E. something that involves moving your entire arm around. I've occasionally looked at jumbo-sized keyboard for those with learning and dexterity difficulties for example.

I learned Dvorak on a Kinesis keyboard. Years later, I realized that switching to the high-quality, consistent, mechanical Kinesis was 99% of the payoff.

If I were doing it over again, I'd have just jumped to something like a QWERTY Realforce with Topre switches.

For the record, the absolute worst keyboard was an early Microsoft 'Ergonomic'. The inconstant resistance absolutely tore my tendons up. Also for the record, the best thing to stave off injuries after healing was taking up rock climbing as a hobby.

I prefer to be the only person using my computer.

As a plus, split keyboard with a custom layout and a minimal window manager kinda act as a lock screen.

I have a non-standard layout and keep a second (small wireless) keyboard around for exactly this reason but to date it hasn;t been needed.

I really wanted to make myself a steno theory for the CharaChorder, but now I don't have time. There's definitely something to be done with keyboards like this and I do reckon you could do better than with the mechanical constraints of the stenotype, but it's not trivial: the extra inputs are hard to make use of if you want to avoid awkward ‘scissoring’ strokes, though there are definitely some comfortable strokes in there to mine.

The physical direction thing is a neat idea but a bit hindered by the fact that the two sides have very different accessibility: typically the inward keypress is much easier than the outward keypress. There might be some pairs that's good for, though, e.g. the backspace/delete pair you mention (if put on the right hand: delete is much less common, in my experience, than backspace).

> So, basically, "grabbing" movements are more natural?

Right, for me at least that seems to be the case. Other Svalboard users seem to pretty unanimously agree that outward movements are worse than inward movements, especially on e.g. the ring finger, but people differ on how the inward/upward/downward movements compare.

I'm currently designing one that is a crossover between the characorder and a Logitech vertical mouse (but not actually a mouse), and I hope to make it cheap. It has been going poorly, to say the least. The biggest problem so far is smaller hands, multiple designs scrapped when put in front of such a person. Maybe I should take inspiration from Svalboard instead? Furthermore, Average Joe is not going to tolerate the massive dependency on layers that these keyboards often have, so I'm still fighting in my head with an approach for that.

The only halfway decent player in this category was Microsoft, with its line of Natural Keyboards. I've used four or five of them, decent enough. I doubt Microsoft was making a lot of money.

The line was discontinued in 2023 and sold to Incase:

https://www.incase.com/pages/incase-designed-by-microsoft-co...

For most people the south keys and center are easier to press and more importantly hold. I don't care much about directions anymore, except for holding down keys.

Layout is a personal thing, we use Vial, so different people have different layouts, mine has a ton of mnemonics in it. It's really up to the user what they want, I'd be surprised if there are 2 Svalboards with the same layout. (Maybe stock when they are starting out, but people develop their own opinions pretty quickly.)

I finally made it into a Micro Center yesterday. There isn't one anywhere near my home state, so I jumped at the opportunity. What did I buy? Two ortholinear keyboards. There is a huge market for these things, and even the geekiest big-box store in the nation only bothers to sell 2. Why? Because nobody wants to spend more than $30 on something they haven't ever tried.

The designer was 100% dependent on his Datahand, now he uses a Svalboard.

When I got sent my first Svalboard, it was so close feel wise that my old muscle memory came back instantly and I started complaining that the layout wasn't the same as the old Datahand Dvorak layout. I ended up doing a faithful port of that layout, then ever time evolved it to the layout I use today.

If you doubt, order a test cluster. You'll see how close it comes.

On the discord some users are willing to meet-up with people to let them try a board in real life.

There are designs with far fewer keys that could probably be carried around more easily, but then you have to learn their layer/chording system.

The Svalboard has an extra issue that some folks prefer it to be placed below desk height, such as attached to a chair or sitting on an under-desk shelf, so it's not something you can generally just put on a table in front of the computer.

Also start dictating more where you can. Try WisprFlow or other cutting edge alternatives

Use LLMs for dictated work even if closely instructed. It can be easier to verbally describe changes to make than to type them out precisely. Even if you are very specific about the changes needed, in terms of code not just functional requirements

And stop typing much on smartphones

> Do I need to stretch more?

No. In fact, I'd say almost certainly not, and you'll see why below.

> Strengthen?

Probably not. That would require more repetitive stress.

> Change my diet?

Don't see how that would help, unless you could use losing weight or improving your blood pressure, in which case yes, definitely.

Here's what's worked for me:

1) have my keyboard at my lap height or slightly above (think keyboard tray, or just put the keyboard on the lap),

2) monitor / laptop up high, so I don't have to look down (my neck also thanks me, not just my hands),

3) enable the accessibility feature known as "sticky keys", which I learned to use long ago,

4) never EVER rest my wrists while typing -- not ever, nor my forearms either.

The thing you have to understand is that the tendons that drive your fingers are anchored at your elbows and are quite long, and they move in tiny sheathes full of lubricant. If you press on the tendons moving through those sheathes, then that's going to cause serious harm. A related thing is that the nerves needed to drive your fingers also move, and some motions place great stress on them. For example, that motion you do to reach a key with your pinky, where you bend your wrist outward is called "ulnar deviation", and it can easily screw up the ulnar nerve that drives the pinky.

(4) helps me deal with all those deviations that hurt the nerves. Instead of turning/twisting my wrist to reach a key I let my hand float over the keyboard, moving the hand to enable the fingers to reach the desired keys with minimal tugging and pressure on the nerves. You don't need sticky keys for this if you learned to type correctly, which means pressing modifier keys with one hand and modified keys with the other, but I didn't learn that way back when, so I had to re-teach myself to type, and sticky keys helped with that.

Oh, and:

5) don't use emacs or anything that requires lots of modifier keys at once. Once again sticky keys helps with this, and to be honest I've never been an emacs user, so this is just me dunking on emacs. The point though is that emacs can really hurt you if you don't know how to type correctly.

Back to stretching: if stretching means putting your nerves through even more stretching and pressure, then it can only hurt you. Your problems aren't muscular, so stretching the muscles won't help. Your problems are with your nerves or your tendons, or both.

Oh, also, if you have anything like neuropathy you need to find a way to not have it. Idk how -- I'm not a medical doctor of any kind, and IIUC neuropathy is not a solved problem anyways.

And remember, IANAD, so take everything I say with salt. I had to figure out what to do about my hands mostly on my own, and I was inspired by a talk I saw where the speaker did pretty much that. The speaker's solutions did not work for me, but the speaker gave me the clues I needed, like the bit about ulnar deviation, and he gave me the impetus I needed: here was proof that one person could fix his hand pain problems, so maybe so could I. The above are roughly my solutions, but above all being conscious of these issues, these motions, and what they do to me -- that was the real solution. Same with posture problems and many other problems: being conscious of your problems, your bad habits, and so on, in real time is 90% of the battle, because then you can learn to correct the problems in real time, and soon it's all muscle memory and you no longer have to be constantly conscious of these details but you still become conscious of them as needed.

Best of luck to you.

Why deny yourself the pleasure of a nice typing experience the majority of the time?

I use a laptop keyboard every so often. It isn't my 1st choice, but for light work it's fine.

I don't avoid using an ultrawide monitor at home, because sometimes I have to use a phone that fits in my pocket.

My Ferris Sweep fits into an 2.5" SSD travel case.

BTW, I've played about 15K matches of my favorite MOBA on the Datahand, works surprisingly well for that, I imagine the Svalboard would too.