[Gllug] RSI: Was VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[Tim Porter]

Yeah the shape of the whole keyboard is something that I think would
make a difference, unfortunately at least on my laptop, that's a bit
tricky.

Yes, Dvorak typing speeds are contentious. The way I look at it is that
QWERTY was designed to be awkward so any alternative layout that's had a
bit of thought put into it should be better unless they did a
particularly bad job.

I can honestly say that from my short experience that Dvorak is more
comfortable and prior to switching over I had been thinking "I don't
really think the position of the keys is whats making QWERTY
uncomfortable here". Infact, I hadn't really considered it that
uncomfortable inn the first place. "Damn this QWERTY" had never crossed
my mind.

At the end of the day, its less distance to move your fingers around,
the middle row on my keyboard reads "AOEUIDHTNS" and I'm informed there
are about 50k words that can be written with just that. I can't say I've
noticed an imbalance in the number of presses from each hand, sure all
the vowels are on the left but this in itself doesn't seem to skew it.

The Maltron is something I will do some further research on. Thanks for
the tip :)

To anyone reading this who doesn't take the whole typing style/posture
thing too seriously, please, have a think about what you're doing.

Tim.

On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 00:58 +0000, Nix wrote:
> On 27 Feb 2009, Tim Porter stated:
> 
> > Talking of RSI, does anyone use any alternative keyboard layouts? How do
> > you find them?
> 
> I use the Maltron layout for extended runs of English text (like this
> one) but not for source code or short comments. It took a lot of getting
> used to, but it *is* nice, notably faster than QWERTY. (One downside of
> this layout is that the layouts for other languages are quite different,
> and it's suboptimal for anything *other* than English text, by design.
> Thankfully switching from QWERTY to Maltron layouts is one keystroke.)
> 
> As predicted (by the MD of Maltron, who should know ;) ) the layout
> hasn't made a significant impact on my RSI: it's the keyboard shape that
> does that (well, and the layout of some of the major non-alphanumeric
> keys, like backspace being on the thumb pad rather than somewhere
> horribly far out of the way like BS is on normal keyboards).
> 
> > I've just started using the Dvorak layout. Its meant to be faster to
> > type on
> 
> This is contentious. Certainly Dvorak's own studies show that: does
> anyone else's? Everything I've seen shows that it has horrendously
> uneven hand loading when typing representative English text (something
> like 80% on one hand; the right, IIRC, but it's been years since I've
> looked at this), which *really* can't help RSI if true.
> 
> > Typing speed is only a secondary concern however, mainly I'm thinking
> 
> That's all it's likely to be good for :/
> 
> > about RSI and general comfort,
> 
> For that you want to look at the shape of the whole keyboard. Contouring
> was certainly helpful to me: for that Maltron, Kinesis and probably
> others do an equally good job.
> 
> > it was advantageous to go as fast as possible, I used to get nasty
> > shooting pains in my wrists and up my forearms (I mean debilitatingly
> > nasty at times),
> 
> Snap.
> 
> >                  thankfully I don't do that job anymore but I worry that
> > in my later years (I'm only 23 now)
> 
> Holy fuck, you had that sort of RSI symptom that young? Ouch!
> 
> I started to get shooting pains when I was about 25, and pain/coldness
> in winter and persistent aches started at about 27. By 29 it was
> horrible.
> 
> I'd say 'act fast before it's too late' only it looks like you did :)
> 
> > If you can stomach learning to type again (it bring back memories if
> > nothing else) then I'd definitely recommend it. 
> 
> Changing the keyboard shape doesn't require relearning typing (it took
> me a week to adapt to the Maltron, almost all due to the non-
> alphanumeric key position changes) and has a huge impact on RSI. I
> cannot recommend it too highly.

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