I had severe problems with finger joint pain several years ago. The docs never figured out what the specific medical problem was, but after years of enduring the pain, the solution turned out to be two-fold:
1. Keyboard retraining in a technique that uses very little finger movement and instead use the large muscles of the arm to position the fingers and press the keys (more a kin to a hunt-and-peck but with all the fingers). The technique works well on a flat or slightly canted (a la MS Natural) keyboard. I can't do the 90wpm I used to, but it's plenty fast for coding.
2. Daily finger and hand exercises with exercise putty before and after work (which I do during my hour commute).
Ergo keyboards may help wrist positioning problems, but they don't do anything to reduce stress on the fingers or hand and may, in fact, exacerbate those problems over time.
Man, that takes me back. COMND, HRROI, ACJ. My first program was written in Pascal using EDIT on the LOTS (Low-overhead Time Sharing) DEC-20 at Stanford. That was a machine. I still miss some of the things it could do. EMACS minibuffer? AYEWBF anyone?
What a different path I would have taken if I'd come a couple years later and cut my teeth on a VAX running UNIX instead. Took me 12 years to find my way to UNIX.
Slashdot Mirror
I had severe problems with finger joint pain several years ago. The docs never figured out what the specific medical problem was, but after years of enduring the pain, the solution turned out to be two-fold: 1. Keyboard retraining in a technique that uses very little finger movement and instead use the large muscles of the arm to position the fingers and press the keys (more a kin to a hunt-and-peck but with all the fingers). The technique works well on a flat or slightly canted (a la MS Natural) keyboard. I can't do the 90wpm I used to, but it's plenty fast for coding. 2. Daily finger and hand exercises with exercise putty before and after work (which I do during my hour commute). Ergo keyboards may help wrist positioning problems, but they don't do anything to reduce stress on the fingers or hand and may, in fact, exacerbate those problems over time.
Man, that takes me back. COMND, HRROI, ACJ. My first program was written in Pascal using EDIT on the LOTS (Low-overhead Time Sharing) DEC-20 at Stanford. That was a machine. I still miss some of the things it could do. EMACS minibuffer? AYEWBF anyone? What a different path I would have taken if I'd come a couple years later and cut my teeth on a VAX running UNIX instead. Took me 12 years to find my way to UNIX.