[hollerith]

Huh. I find ESC easier to type than Caps Lock because it is in the corner of the keyboard.

I used to have RSI and what solved it (over 15 years ago) was taking more care to hit the precise center of the key. Using my sense of touch to sense the key's exact location before even trying to activate the key helps me do that. When the key is on left edge of the keyboard, it is easier to do the determination of the exact location (of the left edge of the key I want) because I don't have to worry about accidentally activating the key to the left of the key I want. Caps Lock of course is also on the left edge of the board, just like ESC is, but ESC is also on the top edge, which is an additional help: the easiest keys to type in my experience are the ESC key and the left control key because they are in corners of the board. (The other two corner keys, "pause/break" and the right arrow key, are harder because of how far they are from the home row.)

I never understood the desire many writers on this site have of moving the hands as little as possible. More precisely, I understand the rationale, but I consider the rationale to be misinformed. If you don't move your hands (i.e., because you have a keyboard with only 36 keys or something), you still have to use your arm muscles to hold your hands over the board, and the human brain is better at movement than at using the muscles to statically counteract gravity like that. That is part of it, but there is more. When hitting a ball with a tennis racket, it is ergonomic to take a back swing, i.e., to move the part of the racket that will hit the ball in the direction opposite the direction you want the ball to go, before starting the swing. Very quick back swings are important in typing, too, for preventing RSI (for reasons I don't fully understand). And I think moving my hands around the board (i.e., in the 2 horizontal dimensions) makes it less likely my brain will put the relevant muscles in "freeze mode", which makes RSI more likely. Or something like that.

[__MatrixMan__]

> Using my sense of touch to sense the key's exact location before even trying to activate the key helps me do that.

I like to use different kinds of keycaps on the same keyboard to give myself tactical hints for this reason. It's common to have `f` and `j` differentiated, but I also have different textures for differentiating the alpha keys from their neighbors and for what I consider "home" for my thumbs.

[cassepipe]

Vim stockholm syndrome ?

I don't know about RSI yet but I do know one thing : Vim workflow is to make a quick edit and then go back to normal mode as quickly as you can. This prevent accidental inserts and you are always back at the command center for your next edit. The same way some people understood most of the time is spent reading code rather than writing, vim's insight is that more time is spent doing edits than actually inserting text. So maybe strecthing your pinkie to the far (but admittedly easily locatable) corner of your keyboard is good RSI exercise I don't know but the Caps lock is just as easy for your finger to locate and don't require strechting. It's just better.

[Izkata]

For me it's the same as them, and it's because I don't bother with home row typing. Too restrictive, my fingers don't easily bend that way. Instead I do a sort of whole-(laptop)-keyboard thing where I know where the keys are relative to the edges, and use my shoulders and elbows to move my hands as much as I use my wrists - no twisting needed, so Escape is as easy to hit as most other keys.

[hollerith]

>use my shoulders and elbows to move my hands as much as I use my wrists

Yes, that is what I do. In particular, no muscle ever needs to stretch to anything close to the limit of its range of motion the way I type because the shoulders and the elbows can move over a much larger range than what is needed for moving the hand around its half of the keyboard.

Note that there is a third alternative, namely to keep the palm of the hand stationary and use the tiny muscles that move the finger left or right relative to the palm, which strikes me as even worse than bending the wrist left or right, and there is a keyboard called the DataHand that encourages, nay, requires, that:

https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=16008

This DataHand keyboard has very bad ergonomics, IMHO, and my guess is that switching to it causes more RSI than it prevents.