[Gllug] RSI: Was VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[Nix]

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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