🇮🇱 Pavel BibergalA long time ago (around 15 years), I had my first episode of RSI from coding too much. Because of this, I have switched to the "Programmers Dvorak" keyboard layout and started using the Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard. Unfortunately, about a month ago, the RSI came back. Forcing me to take a break from typing for a week. I started to look for solutions and found Glove80 keyboard, which I bought after some hesitation. Will keep updating my progress here hoping it will help more people with RSI
So, I've been using the keyboard for 3 days already. There is definitely a learning curve for it, and a steep one. Rewiring the neurons after using the same keyboard for over 15 years is hard. It took me about 2 hours of practice to get back to 3rd of my average typing speed for simple texts. The first hour was highly frustrating. For someone who spends most of his day coding and typing, it's like taking away the ability to speak and to do essential words. But I knew it would pass.
I think one of the main reasons for slow typing was the position of the backspace button on the keyboard. It is located at the left thumb position. The same finger I used to press space. I was constantly deleting the last character when I wanted to press space. Now, it clicked in my brain, and I started using my right thumb for space and left for backspace. And I must say, it feels much more natural and comfortable than the usual position on classical keyboards.
After the rewiring space/backspace neurons, I got a major improvement in typing speed. It is still not my previous speed but now at least I can "speak"
Day 4 of using my Glove80 keyboard to fight a horrible case of RSI. I find it really pleasant experience typing on the keyboard. The feeling of the keys, the hand position. I'm a big person, and this split keyboard is allowing to sit with my chest open and shoulder apart. This is a nice bonus. On the negative side, I'm now trying to code with this keyboard, and the muscle memory really kicks in when I'm thinking of data transforms instead of what key to press next. I need to continue practicing.
One cool feature of the Glove80 keyboard is that it is programmable. I use snake_case a lot for coding, and I realized that it is actually used as space to make function and variable names more readable but to keep them as one for the compiler, so I reconfigured my keyboard, now when I do a short tap on the space bar (or a space button in this case) it outputs the space character, but if I hold it for more than 200 ms down, it will output an _ character. This was a wow moment for me.
Gaining enough confidence typing c code in monkeytype.com with my new Glove80, I have opened emacs to start working for real. And got "slapped around a bit with a large trout" to put it nicely. Figures out, after working with emacs for decades, I don't remember any of emacs shortcuts by keys or names, it was just all muscle memory, my fingers automatically did what i wanted to do. Like playing a piano. Now I have to look up the name of the action I want to do and consciously press the shortcut.
I think Im starting to see an improvement with my RSI, but it's very hard to say yet
I've been using the glove 80 keyboard for a week or so now. Found an angle where the hand doesn't hurt at all when I work. The hand has definitely improved. Sometimes I even forget about the pain. And sometimes it comes back. I regained almost 100% of my typing speed for English, around and around 60% of my coding speed in emacs. The experience of working on the keyboard is amazing. I did a lot of customization using their layout editor. Like hold the button instead of shift press for numbers.
Geoff Evans