[breadbox]

I've been using a pedal on my Kinesis for a shift key for about 5-10 years now.

At some point I noticed that my left pinky was experiencing more pain than my other 9 fingers, due to its heavy use for holding shift and ctrl while pressing other keys. The Kinesis has two lovely ctrl keys in the thumb position, so I trained myself to start using those instead by remapping the pinky-placed ctrl key to F12. (Initially I just unmapped it, letting it devolve back into the awful capslock key, but F12 actually proved to be a better deterrent for retraining, as its negative effect was immediate.)

That helped with the pain, but only a little. So I bit the bullet and mapped the shift key to F11, forcing me to use my foot pedal for shfit.

Even after years of practice, it's still hard to use. The timing of a foot press is very different from a finger press -- the leg muscles require more time to build up the extra force necessary for the pedal. (The pedal is much stiffer than a keyboard key, because it has to accept the weight of the front of my foot without triggering, as opposed to the weight of a single finger.) I still find myself capitalizing the second letter of a word because of this issue. wHich looks ridiculous. And it forces me to sit squarely in my chair, with legs uncrossed, which I find very unnatural.

But my left pinky doesn't hurt anymore.