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by Cannabat
1014 days ago
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I'm not sure if taking regular breaks and doing exercises can fully mitigate the RSI and discomfort/pain that drives many to use ergonomic keyboards and input devices. Personally, my wrists start to hurt after only an hour or two of use of a "normal" keyboard and mouse. It doesn't matter if I've spent the previous 3 months offline doing yoga (getting very thorough full-body movement) or totally absorbed in some computer-y project - "normal" input devices hurt! My shoulders and back are more tolerant, but eventually they start to ache too. It's likely I didn't take care of myself properly earlier in life, but using a split keyboard and tilted thumb-operated trackball mean I can continue coding without nerve pain. To be clear, the goal is not exactly to move less - it's to keep the wrists and shoulders in a neutral, less-stressful position. |
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IME, what has worked for me is to make the interval of the "regular breaks" on the order of one hour. The break isn't much, just get up, grab a glass of water or whatever, moving my arms and wrists a bit, then sit back down.
> To be clear, the goal is not exactly to move less - it's to keep the wrists and shoulders in a neutral, less-stressful position.
I fully agree with this.
The only hardware issue that couldn't be solved with this approach and required a new keyboard was the wrists-angled-up situation imposed by a 2012-era Apple keyboard (don't know if they've evolved since).
I've always refused to type for longer than a few minutes on keyboards that don't at least lay flat on the table. And for the keyboards I use every day (when sitting at my home or work desk) I've insisted on keyboards with a wrist rest and no number pad. I have a TKL one at home, and I think even that may be too large. My "75%" (laptop style, with the arrows under Enter and HOME / END / etc in a column to the right of Enter) is perfect.