111–120 of 283 posts
Those thumbs are doing a lot of work. Can't imagine that being ergonomic.
In my experience (having also had thumb discomfort on ergo boards) thumb clusters can be great, but you have to make sure to avoid too much thumb movement.
I started having RSI issues 2 years ago, what a way to welcome me to my 30s. It was excruciatingly painful just getting through a workday even with plenty of breaks. I didn't care for building my own keyboard I literally just wanted something to help me not be in pain no matter how weird it looked. I've ended up on a Kinesis advantage 360 pro after spending thousands of dollars on keyboards because I needed something…
Glove80 has a better key well and thumb cluster for most people though. I have made a detailed comparison here:
https://danieldk.eu/MoErgo-Glove80-Review
Also agree with the sibling commenters. In order, get:
- Help from an expert/exercise/do very regular breaks.
- A properly adjustable chair.
- A height-adjustable desk (get an electronic one, it's the only one you will ever tune properly, other desks are too much effort).
- Only then an ergo keyboard.
An ergo keyboard is worthless if you do not get the basics right (diagnose the issues, letting the blood flow, having a good posture). I am in some ergo keyboard Discords and it happens far too often that people by an ergo keyboard, but do not even have a setup where they can have a good posture.
The thing I don’t like about keyboards this is that I still have to use a mouse and these keyboards don’t really address that. If I mounted on the arms of my desk, it’s even harder to get to the mouse. Maybe a few people can get away with just them all day, but I can’t.
I switched from a Moonlander to a UHK, and I have the trackball module for it. Life changing. I don't use a mouse anymore and instead have a trackball right under my thumb.
Maybe someday I can afford this, but I miss the IBM Thinkpad Trackpoint.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thumbs are one of your stronger fingers. In contrast the pinky is by far the weakest but we have dedicated it to almost every modifier and outlying key. I currently use an Elora from SplitKB so I can't speak to the Moonlanders thumb cluster, but if you find one you like it's a massive difference in how much usage you can get out of your thumbs while typing.
For me the biggest benefit of thumb keys isn't finger strength, it's the fact that the thumb is separated from the rest of the hand. It's really easy to hit a thumb key while hitting any other key on the "main" part of the keyboard. Whereas on a traditional keyboard, typing something like shift-T or ctrl-R requires stretching out your hand.
Mirrored home row mods are even much nicer (IMO).
I started having RSI issues 2 years ago, what a way to welcome me to my 30s. It was excruciatingly painful just getting through a workday even with plenty of breaks. I didn't care for building my own keyboard I literally just wanted something to help me not be in pain no matter how weird it looked. I've ended up on a Kinesis advantage 360 pro after spending thousands of dollars on keyboards because I needed something…
As an FYI, I had a similar issue and tried a whole lot of things, including different mechanical keyboards, with which I had a variety of successes and failures. But ultimately what REALLY helped was going to physiotherapy and identifying muscle groups in my back that were weak, causing me to sit weird and support my arms with muscles in my shoulders that weren't designed for that. And because all of this is connecte…
I started having RSI issues 2 years ago, what a way to welcome me to my 30s. It was excruciatingly painful just getting through a workday even with plenty of breaks. I didn't care for building my own keyboard I literally just wanted something to help me not be in pain no matter how weird it looked. I've ended up on a Kinesis advantage 360 pro after spending thousands of dollars on keyboards because I needed something…
I love my Glove80 with Pro Red chocs. Kinesis Advantage for 15 years before that one. Another commenter complained that it feels insubstantial. However its light weight is much preferred for travel. It's fine.
The Advantage helped me a lot, but the Glove80 is the only keyboard I’ve truly loved using. The key well is insanely well-designed and even though the tenting is a bit of work to set up, it is really tailored to my preferred angle.
MoErgo is also expanding the Choc keyboard space with really nice silent switches (Cherry/Plum Blossom) and keycaps.
Yes, they are a lot of money. I don’t have time to game any more, and they clearly focus mainly on gamers. But if you’re a software / IT person your wrists are your livelihood, so for goodness sakes invest in them. There is no silver bullet and you will probably have to try a number of possible solutions if you suffer from wrist and forearm pain when working, but do not ignore it and take your workplace ergonomics seriously.
For younger engineers, learn to minimise your “travel” and learning editor shortcuts, terminal shortcuts and similar so that you can be smoothly productive with constantly shifting from mouse to keyboard and back again. And take regular breaks! Get up and walk around. If you are WFH get out for walk at lunch.
In general, care for your body so that you may write code into your 80s.
I know you mention it already in the article but it is really worth trying out. You even get more tenting angles that would previously be impossible without it. And it just makes the whole thing a lot sturdier.
> here are my thoughts on ... you should literally buy any mechanical keyboard ... with programmable firmware Funnily enough, the Moonlander was not this for me. It's programmable, but the round-trip time for programming meant that I didn't modify it often, and only modified it in significant ways, which meant I'd then forget key combinations immediately. This was particularly prevalent for anything where you have to…
> I switched from a Moonlander to a UHK, and the programming time is ~instant. You click flash and in 1-2 seconds it's done. For the Moonlander you have to download the firmware, find the file, drag and drop onto the flashing tool, and wait 10+ seconds. It's amazing how much of a difference that made for me. Actually I point out you can use webusb to flash it (if you use Chrome) further down ...
How long does the flash take? Having it in Chrome is a great step forward, but if it still takes 10-20s to flash that would still prevent the sort of feedback loop that I found so transformational.