I'd like to make an accessory recommendation: get one of those grip-strength things and use it all the time. This did two things for me: 1. Extra strength in hands and forearms makes you more resistant to injury of all kinds there 2. More importantly I think, having extra muscles in your hands and forearms gives you more proprioception feedback to help know when you're putting your hands and wrists in an uncomfortabl…
How did you increase strength in your hands and forearms?
> get one of those grip-strength things and use it all the time
There are probably multiple different causes for RSI in programmers, but for me, a regular keyboard is fine. Even my slouch is fine. I type with my elbows on the table and it's fine. It's the mouse that killed me. A handful of years after graduating from college, I thought my programming career was over because the pain in my neck and shoulders was so bad I couldn't type. I went to a bunch of doctors, neurologists, p…
> It turns out twisting my right hand outward in order to accommodate my mouse to the right of my keyboard was the culprit.
This has been my experience too. I used to have a TKL keyboard, thought I needed a numpad even though the only times I would've had use for it have been Blender and a GTA V plane flying mission.
Now I've gone down the rabbit hole of split keyboards and ergonomic mice when all I really need is a TKL keyboard. ZSA Moonlander is dope, but it doesn't help the mouse situation.
Having recently gotten back into mechanical keyboards, partially for ergonomic reasons, I can say the Moonlander so far is the single board I regret purchasing. Almost $400 for a board that is so poorly designed you have to choose between a usable thumb cluster position or a comfortable tenting angle, because the thumb cluster is used as one of the tenting legs. So unless you have giant hands, it's just a very poor e…
I’m hooked on the ergodox classic, but I’ve used an ergodox variant of some kind for at least 6 years now and won’t go back. The little ortho-linear keyboards that are popular now make me cringe, they look worse than laptop keyboards. I was toying with the idea of picking up the moonlander, but it looks kind of big. The wrist rests seem ridiculously large. Can you use the tenting feature without them?
If you take the Moonlander apart, you can probably remove the wrist rests and it would still tent fine.
However large it may seem, the size seems good to me. I only actively use (i.e. place my hand on) maybe 2/3 of it, but the remainder makes it so that the angle is more comfortable than I imagine it would be if it were shorter.
It's worth mentioning I have relatively large hands. If you don't, you might need a fair bit less space.
I find it really odd that the OP is staring down the barrel of an RSI that's going to inexorably lock them (presumably) out of their career and passion, but the learning curve for a proper ergonomic keyboard seemed to high. I was up to an acceptable 40WPM on the Ergodox a week after switching, and his complaints about " the Cherry MX" switches fall a little flat since there's about a dozen different kinds, all with d…
Switching to ortholinear can really mess you up when you have to use a laptop or colleague's keyboard.
I do that. Atreus with Dvorak by day, laptop keyboard with QWERTY in the evening. It's basically not an issue.
Trackball gang unite (?) I got the ergo one[1] and my wrist pain went away, the key is that now I don't move my wrist anymore. [1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice/mx-ergo-wireles...
I've got a love hate relationship with the ergo. I love the tilt, and the improved build quality. But I wish it had better battery life, was a size bigger, and had Linux drivers.
I use the MX Ergo on Linux. Never had to install any drivers. Works perfectly.
> Kinesis are keyboards with separated key clusters, but not split keyboards. When one says split keyboard I think they are normally talking about things like the Ergodox EZ/Moonlander Kinesis has also their freestyle-line, which are physically splitted keyboard. But traditionally, the name refers to the split of the key-segments, not the whole keyboard. Until a decade ago, there barely where any real split keyboards…
> But even the most silent switch can't compete with the absorption of a normal rubberdome. Stiff matter hitting stiff matter always produces some noise, and most people don't know how to use mechanical keyboards correctly to reduce this. I mostly agree. That said, my Keychron K1 (red switches, v3 so this may be out of date) is not noticeably louder to my very noise sensitive ears than a similar Apple low profile key…
I have the Keychron K1 (also red switches) and an Apple keyboard in front of me right now. The K1 is significantly louder at normal typing forces. ~60dB vs ~45dB using a sound meter app.
I find it really odd that the OP is staring down the barrel of an RSI that's going to inexorably lock them (presumably) out of their career and passion, but the learning curve for a proper ergonomic keyboard seemed to high. I was up to an acceptable 40WPM on the Ergodox a week after switching, and his complaints about " the Cherry MX" switches fall a little flat since there's about a dozen different kinds, all with d…
Switching to ortholinear can really mess you up when you have to use a laptop or colleague's keyboard.
I've used an ortholinear keyboard as my main keyboard for the last four years (Keyboardio Model 01 and occasionally Atreus as my travel/backup). Using a regular layout keyboard slows me down for a bit, but that often has more to do with the placement of modifier keys, Enter, Backspace, and so on rather than the ortholinear vs skewed layout. Still, I can readjust after an hour or so. Oddly, I find that I have almost no readjustment period when I use the keyboard on a laptop. The catch might be that I've never felt comfortable typing on a laptop keyboard, even before I started using ortholinear layouts. I see people sitting at cafes working on their laptops for hours and I just could never do that and don't really understand how other people can do it without destroying their wrists and necks.
> I tried a few of those Kinesis split keyboards. Too squishy for me. Not far enough apart. The CherryMX Kinesis split keyboard was is too clickey for calls and screenshares. Muscle memory made it difficult to switch. This is a really cool hack, and I’m happy that the author found a solution for their pain that works for them, but this bit confused me. Kinesis are keyboards with separated key clusters, but not split…
Having recently gotten back into mechanical keyboards, partially for ergonomic reasons, I can say the Moonlander so far is the single board I regret purchasing. Almost $400 for a board that is so poorly designed you have to choose between a usable thumb cluster position or a comfortable tenting angle, because the thumb cluster is used as one of the tenting legs. So unless you have giant hands, it's just a very poor e…
I have made my own keyboards before, hand-wired with 3D printed cases, and it's probably 20-40 hours of work; significantly more than the $400 that ZSA charges.
I agree that they messed up the thumb clusters. I used to use an Ergodox and that had a pretty goofy arrangement, and the Moonlander doesn't really improve on it.
Just to be clear on the distinction, are we terming 'split segment' the keyboards in two halves that have (roughly) half the usual keys on each device, and saying purist's 'split keyboard' is.. two 'normal' keyboards? Nothing is 'split' in the latter though? I've never thought 'split keyboard' a misnomer in referring to two pieces that look like a keyboard sawn (often carefully around staggered keycaps) in half, i.e.…
No. It's hard to explain, but split segment looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/kjWmciy (so, one physical keyboard, just with a very different layout) Split keyboards are usually 2 separate keyboards with half the key each.
Oh I see, thanks. I have seen those, just didn't think of it - they seem strictly worse than two separate halves to me, the main thing that appeals to me (I don't have one) is positioning either have however, at whatever angle, and differently to the other, to suit me and how I happen to be sitting at the time. Split segment seems to make a big assumption about what people find uncomfortable (narrow/er than shoulders) and offer a different fixed solution.