Any of you who know me know that I have been struggling with carpal tunnel syndrome for the last year or so.  A combination of working with a laptop in an ergonomically undesirable position, frequent days longer than 12 hours coding, and my personal winter vocation (ice climbing) put me in pretty consistent pain.   The problem with ice climbing is as you reach to place your tool into the ice, your wrist bends at an acute angle.  Then, to move your feet up, you must weight the bent wrists.  The pain got to the point last February where I had to completely stop climbing ice, despite having a trip planned for Ouray.  Even rock climbing had to stop, relegating me to short day trips to the Flat Irons (mostly footwork climbing) until things improved.

The pain lessened long after the ice was melted, and I was able to return to  a pretty regular climbing schedule, but often pressures from my clients would cause the wrist pain to flare up.  I used wrist braces to help keep my wrists in correct position, but I was simply unable to maintain my usual pace without going to bed at night with aching wrists.

With ice season approaching, I had to find a solution to this problem, as I really love climbing ice, it brings you to some pretty spectacular places.  At Plonecon this year, I saw two people with the same unusual keyboard, a Kinesis Advantage.  I asked them about it, and everyone gave it good reviews, saying that it really helped them.  When I got back from Plonecon I plunked down $250 for a refurbished keyboard at home, and started carting it back and forth to work.

This keyboard is not one who’s transition you can take lightly.  As you can see, it has an unusual physical layout, but if you have been using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, the transition may not be too bad.   One think that took a while to get used to is that the keys are aligned vertically.  This creates a lot less strain, but is quite unusal at first. After a month or so of use, I can say that my typing skills have returned to what they once were, even in a programming environment, where you have to use weird symbols, and the arrow keys a lot.

The keyboard has helped me reduce the amount of pain in my wrists enough that I can resume ice climbing.  However, the change comes about not only because the keyboard offers better ergonomics, but it has changed the way I type, equalizing the work that both hands do.  If your keyboard is more than 6, months old, pick it up, and hold it at an angle so you can see which keys have a glossy shine, and which ones are still opaque.  You can learn a lot about a way a person types by examining their keyboard.  Do you use both shift keys?  Which  thumb do you use to hit the spacebar?

The biggest struggle for me with the new keyboard was the fact that the “b” key is on the left hand.  I’ve been typing that one with the right hand for as long as I can remember.  When I look at how I used to hold my hands over the keyboard, I can see that the left hand is bent a little, which makes hitting the “b” key a little more difficult, which is why I probably did that with the right hand.  Also, I used the left shift key exclusively.  I still struggle with that, but I am getting a better about using the right one as well, you just have to take a little more time when typing capitals to be able to use both.  (This would really suck if I was a JavaProgrammer)

Besides helping improving my typing prowess, the keyboard offloads a lot of work to the thumbs, eliminating the wrist-snapping alt-tab combination that caused the majority of my problems… In fact, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-x, where I spend a lot of my time is now a two-handed affair.  This takes a lot of the stress off my left hand, which had much worse pain than the right.  Lastly, the arrow keys are moved to below the left and right hands, and while this is a little weird to get used to, it is nice not having to move my right hand to get to those keys.  It also forces me to use both shift keys more, since you must use them to highlight text the way you need for cutting and pasting.

While the Kinesis keyboard is pretty unusual, and a bit hard to get used to, the keyboard comes with a set of exercises which really helped me get used to it.  The first day, the exercises probably took > 2 hours, but after a week of doing them, I had that down to < 25 minutes.  In between I used my old keyboard, because I just had to get work done, but I used the Kinesis more and more over time, and after a month, it is now full time, and I really don’t like using standard keyboards, but the transition going between the two is not too bad.

This is kind of a long post, but if you are having RSI, and aren’t sure that spending $250+ dollars is going to be worth it, perhaps this blog post will help you decide.   My refurbished keyboard at home is not discernibly different from the brand new one my work purchased for me, and both have worked for a month rock-solid.  The one thing I noticed was that the Kinesis had a somewhat higher energy profile, requiring me to replace my 4 port usb hub with a powered one.  I might add that I had the mouse and old keyboard plugged into the Kinesis, so it was in fact drawing the power of 2 keyboards, if you have the ability to simply replace your old keyboard, you may not see this problem.  Lastly, you are able to re-map the keys on the keyboard, which I did with the up/down keys.  This opens up the posibility for a dvorak layout, but the home keys are different from the other keys, so it might be worth it to invest in the more expensive version that comes with special keys designed specifically for this layout if that is what you prefer.

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