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Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

My ErgodoxEZ:

- nearly made me cry.

- solved my back pain.

When you didn't learn to type properly, relearning to type can be a very difficult task; re-learning on a split keyboard is particularly unforgiving. Around three weeks into re-learning I was convinced I would never learn properly and that I'd wasted a lot of time and money (I was freelancing at the time) on something that wouldn't help me eat, never mind sleep.

Two weeks later I was back up to normal typing speeds, a month after that I was faster than ever. Two months or so after that, my back pain was gone.

Of course, my back pain was caused by sitting lopsided - something an overdominant hand on a standard keyboard pushes you towards. No amount of exercise and posture correction was solving it - but when the true cause was resolved it cleared up (with exercise) very quickly.

I'd buy this keyboard again in a heartbeat.

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Countervailing story: the Ergodox (EZ specifically but that's less important) gave me permanent RSI in my thumbs, because it was too big for my hands, and to this day I pretty much can't use a keyboard layout that relies on lots of thumb involvement. Even just hitting the spacebar throughout the day or using my thumbs to type on a smartphone is enough to flare it up, almost a decade after I stopped using that keyboard.

YMMV, ergonomics are highly personal with respect to your body size and proportions. We didn't have the proliferation of keyboard layouts then that we do now. Perhaps if the Iris or Corne had existed then, I would still be using my thumbs for modifier keys in a 40% layout. I never got the hang of tapdance or hold modifiers.

The Atreus layout is the only one I can still use somewhat, because the thumbs are held closer to the hand rather than splayed out.

Any other tips, I have basically the same thing.

Mitosis is the layout that I like, it doesn't require a huge thumb stretch.

I have joint problems in my thumbs and have trouble with thumb-heavy layouts, but have found the Sofle V2 to work well for me. For my hands it is important that the center thumb key be directly below the N and B keys, which the Sofle provides.

Details at https://josef-adamcik.cz/electronics/another_year_for_sofle....

PSA: Thumbs can get overuse injuries [1]

https://getreuer.info/posts/keyboards/thumb-ergo/index.html

> - nearly made me cry.

> - solved my back pain.

Reminds me of the first time I got to sit in an Actually Good chair that came with a new job. My back was killing me for the first couple weeks as the decades-old knots undid themselves.

I got to relive it when I went back to crappy office chairs at my next gig.

I actually found going from non-split to split surprising easy, simply because none of my old muscle memory worked anymore, and I had never touch typed up until then, so I wasn't able to go back to the old way out of frustration. A few hours of doing touch typing drills on some free online thing, and I could type at 30wpm, and then it only took about a week of doing my usual coding, IRC chatting etc to get back up to my usual 100wpm.

Also surprising was that after I got there, I could also touch type pretty easily on a normal keyboard. But my old ad hoc 5 finger typing had somehow disappeared entirely.

Exercising and specifically lifting weights will do so much more for your back pain than any ergonomic setup ever will

Why not both. That's my approach.

Also stretching and mobility training.. using a split keyboard has been awesome because you really feel the difference compared to a "normal" keyboard once you've been paying attention to opening up the shoulders

> When you didn't learn to type properly

Not learning to type properly is probably the best thing you can do for your wrists when typing.

Keeping fingers on home row is very bad posture for your wrists on a normal keyboard.

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