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... from a guy who fitted two keyboards to make A $14 "ergo" keyboard from surplus parts.

Quote from his site (including pictures of the process): "Part of my symptoms were pains in my elbows from being constantly bent, and pains in my wrists from being held rotated, in the plane of the keyboard. I wanted a keyboard which allowed my wrists and arms to be in their relaxed positions, i.e. at my sides. What I imagined was, basically, a saddle-bag keyboard."

CC.

WRT the DIY version, you can set Linux up to merge inputs from multiple keyboards (actually, that's its default behaviour and dissuading it from doing that is one of the big traumas involved in making multiple independent X instances work), so you could plug two potentially mangled keyboards in and lay one to each side, and potentially also have another unmangled keyboard before you as well.

How about this rather unique solution? No tired arms here!

=Smidge=

I probably saw the same thing: just found it here (and google found me another page on fully split keyboards).

However the reason for my suggestion of two keyboards was to make some (ie the middle columns), or even all, of the keys available to both hands, for those of us who don't touch type by the book

I find myself not keeping my hands in the recommended typing positions mostly because all of the symbols which form a large percentage of the source code of most computer languages would be rather uncomfortable to type, notably the }, )and Tab (if you're using emacs or anything with tab completion) characters one a qwerty keyboard which have very high frequencies in java and c++ (and the problem is even worse on a dvorak layout, which is great for typing English, but terrible for c++).

With the whole keyboard repeated, I'd be able to type like back in the bad old days of non-split keyboards and let the other hand drift over momentarily whilst typing a back-tick, Escape or a } (or worst of all a "Page Up" (well not quite the worst, when some software forces you to have to reach for the mouse .... grrrrrr)) rather than having to either stretch excessivly or wait for the correct hand to get back in place.

Using a USB keyboard solves the problem of needing some kind of ps2 Y splitter.

Have your keyboard in the natural ass-scratching position.

(and make one for under $20)

Yes, as seen on /. quite a while ago.

And for mousage, I've got a Cirque touchpad glued to the middle of the keyboard. Arguably, this sucks, but my philosophy is to avoid mousing anyway.

But, despite the fact that the Kinesis contoured models are clearly the best, they are also clearly not perfect. They're rather thick: I put mine in my lap, and I'd still rather have it a little lower. They've got a bit of a hump, but it's not quite as high as something like an MS Natural, and it probably should be. Also, the keyboard pockets seem a tad close together to me. (One of these days I'm going to try sawing one in half, so I can dangle my hands at my side, ala the infamous Fourteen Dollar Keyboard hack.).

They also take some re-training time of course, but what the hell, if you're an Emacs adept you can handle it.

http://thecraftstudio.com/bcboy/keybo ard.html

The caption from cruel.com: "Build your own under-the-ass keyboard."

...the under-the-ass keyboard.

RSI as I understand it is caused by the repetitive action, and only exacerbated by the poor ergonomics of most keyboards. The only cure is for motion detectors on the fingernails and to type on air.