- 8 Steps To A Pain-Free Back (Esther Gokhale) - More like 8 chapters to a pain-free back, but still good. I did every exercise in this book and it fixed my lumbar pain in one week.
- Your eyes should be level with the top of your screen; measure the distance you need and buy a riser accordingly. I've been using a $20 knockoff of the portable "Roost" laptop stand for several years and I love it.
- The average ergonomic desk chair is terribly proportioned for short people, and I am unable to sit back against one without sitting cross-legged in it. As a very short person I've had the most luck with armless drafting chairs, benches, tailbone cushions, and floor cushions, but that's just me. Don't buy stuff just because marketing tells you to.
- A soft posture corrector can be helpful to remind your shoulders not to slouch forward.
- Vimium adds vim bindings to your browser so you don't have to use your mouse.
This lightning talk I made mostly focuses on keyboards, but includes diagrams on the natural position your body parts want to be in, and how to debug some common ergonomics issues you might have from computer use.
TBD but vertical mice work well for people with wrist pronation issues
Ergonomic keyboards are intensely personal and varied based on your particular injuries and hand requirements, and no single one will work for everyone. If you see a proprietary keyboard advertising itself as the ultimate and best keyboard for everyone, stay away from them. Your best bet is to try printing up some layouts to see what feels natural for your hands, and collect advice from people with similar use cases and similar types of repetitive strain injury.
In particular, when asking for keyboard recommendations, it is helpful to describe your particular RSI & situation.
- is the pain in your wrist, pinky, thumb, forearm, etc?
- is the pain in your nerves, joints, or muscles?
- do you feel the pain on extension, flexion, movement in general, while pressing keys, etc?
- are there particular things about your current layout that give you pain? bad wrist angle, overreliance on pinky, etc?
- do you have any specialized workflows that benefit from potentiometers (rotary dials) or other hardware besides just keys? (video editing, CAD, etc; note that you can get low-cost
qmkmacropads with potentiometers if you don't want to deal with them on your primary keyboard.) - how big are your hands? more importantly, what position do your hands prefer to rest in?
- what's your budget?
- how severe are your hand injuries / how fast do you need to acquire a different keyboard?
Example pain-to-solution mappings:
- If you feel the pain most in your fingertips or nerves at the moment you strike the keys, then you could probably benefit from lighter switches. But if you are overstriking, then lighter switches alone won't magically solve problems; you might also need to retrain yourself to type more lightly. Tactile switches can help with this. If you feel fingertip pain even when pressing on a key very slowly and gently, then your problems might indeed be addressed just by lighter-weight switches.
- If you feel up-down pain in your wrists, you might benefit from retraining yourself to float your wrists, or from physical wrist rests.
- If you feel side-to-side pain in your wrists, you might benefit from a split board. (A true split board with physically separated halves, not a fixed "split".)
- If your pinkies hurt, try a board with thumb clusters to reduce pinky work.
- If moving your fingers off homerow hurts, try a layered layout on a smaller board so that you don't need to move your hands much.
- splitKbCompare: a split keyboard layout comparison site where you can print life-size layouts to see if they fit your hands; highly recommend doing this before buying anything!
- aposymbiont's filterable split keyboard gallery
- awesome-split-keyboards: quick visual overview of split keyboards
- r/ErgoMechKeyboards: extremely friendly and knowledgeable community of ergonomic mechanical keyboard enthusiasts with hand injuries. (Note that although r/MechanicalKeyboards may appear superficially similar and has some overlap, it is focused on keyboard aesthetics and collecting, and tends to prefer heavier weight switches. I would not recommend it for ergonomics issues.)
- Infographic of mechanical keyboard form factors by SupeRanked
- kbd.news posts cool custom keyboard builds and projects. Dangerously distracting if you are tempted by collecting keyboards, useful if you are looking for inspiration for a very specific mod you want to build.
Body context:
- In 2021, I developed bilateral ulnar nerve damage from a computer-unrelated bike injury which made it excruciatingly painful to type with my pinkies or even gently touch them to a surface with 30g force. It took about 3 months to rehab them after I figured out my new keyboard, which I painstakingly researched and programmed using only 8 of my fingers.
- I have minor/occasional thumb arthritis from smartphone use.
- Fingers 2, 3, and 4 are generally fine on both my hands.
- I touch type and I primarily code in
vim. - Miraculously no wrist issues from 25 years of programming, probably because I always reflexively float my wrists from classical piano training.
- My hands are about a Small in gloves with a 6.5" palmar circumference, although I span a ninth chord on the piano. In other words, tightly packed keys are my ideal homerow resting position, but long reach is not an issue for me if needed.
- I don't like tucking my thumbs underneath my palms to type but I know people who do; there are some physical layouts you can try if you prefer that, such as the Sofle.
Physical keyboard context:
- Prior to my injury, my work keyboard was a WASD mechanical keyboard with standard-weight tactile switches and a standard layout.
- I have a strong semi-photographic visual memory and I wanted an extremely portable board, so I went with a layered 36-key approach.
- My first post-nerve-injury keyboard was a wired 36-key
crkbd/Corne keyboard (MX-profile ortholinear split), which makes great use of layers and has an exceptionally comfortable thumb cluster layout that allowed me to transfer most traditional pinky work to the thumbs. I installed 28g tactile switches. I love the Lenovo trackpoint, so I harvested one from an old keyboard and built myself a custom trackpoint hotswap mod that socketed into thecrkbdso I wouldn't have to carry a mouse. - After a few years, I wanted a lower profile board with more staggered pinky columns, so I switched to a 36-key Chocofi (wireless low-profile ortholinear split with Kyria column stagger) with 20g linear switches. The 4th and 5th columns are staggered downward for a more natural pinky resting position.
Note that wireless open-source keyboards require zmk rather than qmk firmware. zmk doesn't yet support PS/2 pointing devices, so I sadly can't use my custom Lenovo trackpoint mod with my Chocofi yet. Battery life lasts a couple weeks and has never really been an issue because I am always using my keyboard with my laptop, so I can charge it directly off my laptop if I am running low. It charges very quickly, I would say in under an hour.
- QWERTY was not the source of my pain, so I have stayed on it.
- I made a custom layout that requires 36 physical keys, 2 of which are used for layer switching. This results in 4 layers that give me 124 virtual key slots, not counting mod-tap switching. The 3rd layer is mostly for programming shortcuts/macros and the 4th layer is mostly for hardware functions such as bluetooth connection switching; in practice. I only use around 100 of my available key slots.
Do not be fooled by how wacky my keyboard setup looks. I can type 140wpm on it just fine and code at approximately full speed (some things are a little slower, some things are a little faster). Ortholinear slowed me down to 20wpm at first, but after about 2 days of monkeytype practice, I was back at full speed, and can still seamlessly switch to using a standard keyboard layout at full speed. It is very comfortable for me. Hope you also find something that works well for your hands!
You can buy switch tester kits before committing to a big pack of switches. I got a Kono 9-switch tester on eBay for $9 to figure out what switch weight and type might be good for me.
Switch weight: "Standard" switches in laptops and off-the-shelf keyboards are usually in the 60-70g range. 20-30g is good if you have severe nerve pain or RSI. 20g is ultralight and can accidentally actuate if you just rest your fingers on the keys. If floating is an issue for you, I recommend starting with 30g. It will take some practice before a 20g press becomes perceptible to your fingertips. Many laptop users are accustomed to striking their keys quite hard. Try to train yourself to type with the minimum necessary actuation force, because there's no point in buying 20g switches if you're just going to slam your fingers into the board with 100g force anyways.
I like tactile switches because they give good typing feedback so I can type more gently without hitting the bottom of the switch range. This trained me to type more lightly and avoid unnecessary strain. However, I use linears on my low-profile board.
On my standard-height crkbd, I used "Hako Violet" light tactile switches with 28g actuation force, which are the lightest Cherry MX tactiles available. I used DSA keycaps because they feel nice, but I don't think keycap choice is functionally important on Cherry MX switches.
On my low-profile Chocofi, I use 20g low-profile linear "Light Blue" switches with LDSA spherical keycaps. I tried the 35g tactile "Sunset" switches, which are the lightest low-profile tactiles you can get, but they felt a lot heavier than 35g regular-height switches would. This is a known phenomenon where the super-short switch throw feels heavier than its rating. You also hit the bottom of the switch faster, so there's not as big of a difference between how linears and tactiles feel.
Keycaps actually make a big difference on low-profile switches because the switch stem is so short. In my experience, if I strike the flat-profile MBK keycap off to the side, it cantilevers the short switch, adding a lot of friction and making the switch feel heavier. The LDSA spherical keycap only allows me to type straight down into the center of the stem, minimizing friction.
Many indie keyboard users make use of QMK, an open-source firmware project for heavily customizing computer input devices, with great support for layering and macros. ZMK is the wireless equivalent, with slightly different feature support.
If you only need "basic functionality" (remapping keys and using layers and macros), there are some great streamlined tools for that which don't require you to write any code.
- VIA: an extremely user-friendly desktop app for quickly modifying keymaps and auto-reflashing your keyboard with the new configurations.
- QMK Configurator: an online interface & tool for creating configurations for keyboards supported in
qmk_firmware. Can use QMK Toolbox to flash your board.
Some examples of advanced QMK functionality:
- Assigning a key different functions on tap vs. hold, or based on number of taps
- Custom LED/OLED behavior
- Interpret custom franken-keyboard hardware, such as a keyboard with a mini trackball soldered on