Have you tried a trackball? It wasn’t quite as big an improvement as switching to an ergonomic keyboard but I notice a definite improvement in my mousing hand/arm.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the Gergo ergonomic keyboard
There's a bunch of factors that go into reducing stress on the hands, mainly however reducing stretching and improving posture. The main issue with mice is that your hands need to move back and forth and back and forth. You should try and minimize this motion as much as possible using keyboard shortcuts/tiling managers and whatnot. But if you must alternating between a thumb and finger trackball is helpful. Using just one runs the risk of putting too much strain on a single finger. If you can enable drag scrolling with your trackball, I've found that to be less aggravating then using a wheel.
Keyboards like the Dactyl Manuform and MS Natural are great allowing the hands to separate and reach a more neutral positioning but many don't leverage the programability of keyboards to improve RSI. Usually this comes with a necessary reduction in size. Boards in the 40% category do a decent job of reducing the amount of work but you also need to factor in the weight of the switches you're using. I'm a bit of an extremist and swear by 12g Kailh Chocs but something like Gateron Clears (35g) would be more ideal for regular typists.
The main thing is that with a programmable board you can jam more features into less keys. Momentary layers, Vim-style leader keys, multi-modifers (Ctrl-Shift-Alt on a single key), and all sorts of shenanigans (like on-board text snippets). It's not as straight forward as regular boards but like the author noted, it opens so many damn doors.
In my opinion Gergo (while smaller then many keyboards) is too large and runs the risk of pinky-overloading (Modifiers, Bksp, tab, etc). Georgi with a optimized firmware and layout is closer to the ergonomic solution (Providing you're willing to put the time to adjust to chorded QWERTY). It's a shame the DataHand died as it did, the layout was damn near perfect ergonomically.
Comments
Have you tried a trackball? It wasn’t quite as big an improvement as switching to an ergonomic keyboard but I notice a definite improvement in my mousing hand/arm.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the Gergo ergonomic keyboard
There's a bunch of factors that go into reducing stress on the hands, mainly however reducing stretching and improving posture. The main issue with mice is that your hands need to move back and forth and back and forth. You should try and minimize this motion as much as possible using keyboard shortcuts/tiling managers and whatnot. But if you must alternating between a thumb and finger trackball is helpful. Using just one runs the risk of putting too much strain on a single finger. If you can enable drag scrolling with your trackball, I've found that to be less aggravating then using a wheel.
Keyboards like the Dactyl Manuform and MS Natural are great allowing the hands to separate and reach a more neutral positioning but many don't leverage the programability of keyboards to improve RSI. Usually this comes with a necessary reduction in size. Boards in the 40% category do a decent job of reducing the amount of work but you also need to factor in the weight of the switches you're using. I'm a bit of an extremist and swear by 12g Kailh Chocs but something like Gateron Clears (35g) would be more ideal for regular typists.
The main thing is that with a programmable board you can jam more features into less keys. Momentary layers, Vim-style leader keys, multi-modifers (Ctrl-Shift-Alt on a single key), and all sorts of shenanigans (like on-board text snippets). It's not as straight forward as regular boards but like the author noted, it opens so many damn doors.
In my opinion Gergo (while smaller then many keyboards) is too large and runs the risk of pinky-overloading (Modifiers, Bksp, tab, etc). Georgi with a optimized firmware and layout is closer to the ergonomic solution (Providing you're willing to put the time to adjust to chorded QWERTY). It's a shame the DataHand died as it did, the layout was damn near perfect ergonomically.
[1] https://www.gboards.ca/