After years of working as a software developer combined with a daily regimen of piano practice I developed fairly bad tendinitis/RSI issues about ten years ago.
I tried your standard r.i.c.e, taubmann technique, ultrasound, TENS units, easing up on my activities, EVERYTHING. The only thing that really helped me at the end was a book called the trigger point therapy workbook. TPT basically emphasizes using a form of deep tissue massage to attempt to break up residual scar tissue and increase blood flow.
I've been using it as a preventative form of medicine, and I have been RSI free for years now.
My massage person is a wizard. They know exactly where to dig into. I went from pain and tears to pain-free. They keep mentioning scar tissue and blood flow. I spend an hour in traffic to get to a massage appointment and it's absolutely worth it every single time. Great if you can fix things yourself, but I need a wizard to fix up all my stuff.
I've been practically a 16-hours a day computer user for near 40 years now...combined with playing instruments and video games. I've never had wrist, hand or eye problems.
I consider myself extremely fortunate/lucky. OTOH loud music has turned my hearing to utter shit.
I was going to downvote you because obviously this does happen to people and saying "this doesn't happen to me" is kind of annoying. I think you can understand RSI. We don't all get to enjoy a positive outcome from the same seemingly neutral events.
I am also a 16 hour a day computer user and used to be a musician and I've had bouts of "ouch" from playing video games and also from lifting weights or riding a bike a long distance. Lifting weights is a good ouch generally, playing video games is a bad one. But my most downvoted comment is a response to someone being really dismissive about ear damage from loud music. I was in a band and it kind of messed up my ears. I don't have RSI and consider myself lucky, I can still work because my job is typing.
The comment that set me off was "how about simply not playing so fucking loud?"
I would like you to look at the parallels between your comment and the one that set me off, and look at my response and look at how a response from someone who IS suffering from it would see your response and realize how it's just... not helpful. "how about just don't get hurt like I didn't?" Easy! Just invent time travel and don't do that thing that hurt you. You can make choices and you can take precautions. But I did not wear ear plugs at shows because I wanted to hear everything and usually did but sometimes didn't wear ear plugs at band practice and that was very dumb. At the time, I thought it was important to hear it as it was in the room. Listening to the buzz in my ears now, mayyyybe I was wrong about that.
That is very much not what I got from the parent comment. My takeaway was "very odd that I do the same things as you but didn't get RSI".
For what it's worth, I've also been using computers all day for 25 years and didn't get a lick of RSI. I am also wondering what I'm doing differently. Maybe finding that out can help the people who did get it.
In my case, I think it helps that my elbows are resting on the table always, and I take care that my hands/wrists don't need to be in a weird position for me to type. I did learn to type badly (basically typing at an angle), but maybe that means that my wrists were more comfortable that way.
I wasn't making the comment trying to be helpful/unhelpful but didn't realize that I'd strike such a nerve. I consider myself enormously fortunate that I've been able to get away with this all without constant pain.
All I was saying was that I've found it difficult at times to empathize even though I know that I should. I'm admitting my failure to be a good person here. And my "OTOH" comment was a recognition of being a hypocrite. I'm saying sorry without groveling about it.
You may naturally be in a neutral position and not tense your wrists / hands. I found tension from stress to be the worst. Even running would help my RSI, as it helps relieve stress. Adding an ergonomic keyboard to the mix completely fixed it. For me, I think it was 75% stress 25% keyboard/wrist position.
at what age, you started spending your time as a sedentary nerd? I have a theory. I have been similar to you until last year. Then I started exercising, lifting weights, fixed my posture. Then I had to take a break because of life's circumstances, and I got all the ailments and pains people have been complaining about the sedentary lifestyle; back pain and all that.
It is possible, those of us who have been nerds from an early age develop with body skeleto-muscular structure that is more forgiving to this lifestyle.
This is what is known as "genetics". Unfortunately, we're not all born tabula rasa. And yes, never having to concern oneself about soft tissue injuries is quite a blessing.
I'm 32 and have been playing instruments and using computers for a long time. About a decade ago I started developing nerve compression issues that led to tingling and numbing sensations in my outer fingers. I switched to using an ergonomic keyboard and handshake mouse and modified my typing style on "regular" keyboards to eschew the use of the home row to remove ulnar deviation. The most beneficial change, however, was much simpler: I stopped sleeping with my arm under my pillow. As it turns out having my elbow sharply bent for 7 hours at a time was compressing my nerves and exacerbating symptoms. I've had zero problems since then.
As regards hearing: you should buy a few sets of nice re-usable earplugs to keep what you still have. My hearing is still great for my age but I do notice a difference from when I was younger - a few years ago I stopped hearing transformer whine (which was nice) but it was a stark reminder of the fidelity that I'd lost.
Author of the article here, kinda surprised to see this doing so well here. But in case you're all interested, here's my repo of Talon stuff I'm experimenting with: https://github.com/Xe/invocations
I dunno. My wrists are mostly good, but my knuckles aren't always, thanks to the early-onset osteoarthritis that comes with the family hands. I expect there will come days when it would be, if not absolutely necessary, then at least a lot less painful to work this way than with a keyboard, so I'm glad to know there's a viable option.
I'm glad you wrote it up, and that it got to the front page here strikes me as HN working as intended.
This stuff is really worth of taking the effort to learn at least once.
I didn't actually write this up per se :P Technically, I dictated it and there's probably some gnarly typos with homophones in there that I haven't totally eliminated because it was a bit of a fire and forget piece, where I was just dumping my thoughts on a topic.
I mean technically you wouldn't have written it up even with a keyboard, so... :D
And yeah, even notwithstanding the massive accessibility benefit, I can see use in learning it just for the sake of a new lens on how to navigate code. Sort of the same reason I'm looking forward to the big Emacs 29 update on all my machines around the end of the year - among other things, I get to find out firsthand whether I'm as excited as I should be for first class tree-sitter, or not excited enough.
But for VS Code folks, this is already right there and I can't imagine not wanting to play around at least a bit with it and see what it can do.
Have you considered strength training? Strengthening your grip can lessen the pain of arthritis in the hands. Exercises like deadlifts and bent over barbell rows will give you a very strong grip. (People assume it's all about the big muscles but grip strength is actually one of the main limiting factors for deadlift progression!)
If you struggle with deadlifts, a farmer walk with something heavy works wonders as well. I can wake up with my hands aching, get some walks in, and the pain is down to 25% or so. Inflammation feels reduced, hand moves more fluidly, and it doesn’t come back quickly unless it’s very damp and cold.
Farmer walks are amazing and I encourage people to do them more. Deadlifts are awesome for all kinds of reasons too; walks are definitely not a replacement, just a great alternative as far as hands go.
That seems to have helped me a lot. I developed chronic pain in my knuckles from typing. I've had it for about seven years.
I started strength training this year, for other reasons. Using a rowing machine irritated my fingers, so I thought I'd have to avoid things like deadlifts and pullups. But I started using heavy clubs, which really work the grip but with the force pulling in a different direction. I've at least doubled my grip strength with those, and my fingers are a lot better now in general. (Now I'm doing deadlifts and rows too.)
Other things that helped before this:
- Switching to mech keyboards, and training myself to type without bottoming out the keys. When the problem first developed it was so bad I worried my career was ending. Mech keyboards fixed that.
- Holding my hands in ice water for ten minutes each, once a day. First two minutes are super painful, then the rest isn't bad. After a while you get used to it and the first part is all right too. That was more for acute relief when it was getting bad, and it made a huge difference. I've seen at least one study saying it works, too.
I have written about it here before, but I also suffer from pretty bad arthritis in my knuckles, I am only 37 and this has been the case for almost a decade.
After trying many things, the thing that helped me the most was switching to a super low pressure rubber dome keyboard and typing softly. I use a Sun Type 7 but really any keyboard with super low pressure keys would probably do.
Just want to say, I love your writing -- it's rare to find someone with such a distinctive voice. I've read a bunch of your articles and posts, keep going!
Thank you, I'm very glad that the transition to dictation hasn't made me lose a lot of the je ne sais quoi of my voice when writing. I have been using dictation to write my conference talks for a while; but, I have started doing it for my blog very recently. This may be one of those "curse of the artist" type things, but when I read my dictated articles, they just look very different than the ones that I have typed out. I'm not sure how, but they're just different.
Fwiw the finger contortions needed by eMacs were also giving me RSIs - other than cutting my computer use (basically don’t spend every waking moment typing) I switched to vim since I figured its modal nature would require fewer multi-finger combos. I’ve been mostly free of issues for over 15 years now.
Keyboards with thumb clusters are definitely the best option, but in my experience, even on a normal keyboard, simply remapping your keys makes a world of difference.
Here are some of my most useful remaps:
- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"
- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).
- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.
- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.
- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.
The "when not pressed with other keys" stuff is interesting. I never thought about that. The only trouble I can see with this is being unable to type effectively on a normie keyboard. I've had the ctrl/caps swap for years and I regular mess it up on a normie keyboard, although it's no big deal to accidentally press caps, of course. What I like is my portable mechanical keyboard has a physical switch, so it works whatever computer I plug it in to.
Even though, as I wrote above, Emacs does not require finger contortions, I do do finger contortions. I doubt I'll ever stop using Emacs but I have always been a little concerned about my little fingers ("pinkies"). So the options seem to be either evil mode, or a new keyboard, both of which require busting a decade's worth of muscle memory...
I make it a point to always press the modifier key with my other hand to reduce finger contortions. For pressing multiple modifiers, I take my hand off of home row to avoid using my pinky. (I also use a ortho-linear mechanical keyboard with thumb clusters and a Colemak-DH layout.)
Afaik that's in-progress, and the goal is support for other editors, but it's not there yet. Vanilla talon (what cursorless is built on) works fine everywhere though! (You just don't get the AST transforms.)
I know for me I to see these kinds of setups (like every eMacs setup) and realize that my neuro divergence is very different than others
I freeze in awe at how much context and abstractions you have to keep in your head to just navigate and grok what’s happening. It’s like three layers of abstraction and having decades of fluency in a language and IDE/CLI.
“ After a while, they just become second nature like Vim commands do. I have been forcing myself to use this over and over again for the past few days and it's starting to become second nature.”
Ha yeah that does seem like what it would take to learn to use this.
I’ve been making computers go brrrr for 30 years and this level of coding fluency will never not confuse and impress me.
This is the shit. Thank you so much for sharing. I had remembered seeing Talon before, but I did not know you could do this with it. It did not click until today. I have been messing with it all day. Its so much fun. This is a lot closer to how I would expect all of those voice assistants to work. Its also really fun working with a computer like this.
I want to see a study teaching people to code using their voice versus with typing and then also by hand.
Thank you for writing it. This whole post has made me really curious and I've taken the dive into Talon, already having written an app layer for Warp terminal and exposing my (normally not detected) terminal emacs to Talon.
I'm not too interested in Cursorless I don't use VSCode and vim/evil mode text objects are equally powerful (and less visually noisy). Very excited by this whole concept.
I am still trying to wrap my head around how this works. It sounds like it is similar to avy[1] but you use your voice instead of the keyboard? Coupled with some AST aware commands.
I have occasional wrist pain (competitive starcraft and being a software engineer not a great combo) - the only real fix for me was going to the gym a lot. Now that I go to the gym 3-4 times a week, most all of my RSI issues have vanished. Strongly recommend. There is something crushing about wrist pain when your entire value is wrapped up in what you can make computers do.
Also, I love the style of this blog with the chat-replies from friends.
Yeah, at first when the RSI pain started, it felt it was really scary. Like viscerally scary in a way that is hard to describe unless you have felt that kind of fear. realistically, though knowing that I can use this tool to be able to code, even without the use of my hands, it makes me just feel calm. Obviously, I wouldn't want to lose use of my hands, but should that reality happen it is something that I could actually live with and tolerate. Would suck to give up video games entirely though. It's amazingly ironic that coding without your hands, ends up being faster than coding with your hands, but it wouldn't be reality if it wasn't ironic eh?
> Would suck to give up video games entirely though.
You don't necessarily have to do that. I'm adding voice recognition into the game I'm working on right now, for example. It helps that it's a turn-based strategy game to begin with, though.
And there are players that manage to play games with limited or no mobility in their hands at all, with the right accessible controllers.
Playing games on PC has been a trigger for me for a long time and gets uncomfortable quickly. I got a PSVR2 headset last year and it's a great way for me to play games and not be in the same mostly static position all day. I can play games on it without any discomfort (other than wearing the headset itself which isn't great if it's a really hot day) and you can switch up sitting/standing which I also like.
I have a Quest 2 and I've had to limit my playing of it not because of wrist RSI but it seems like I tend to accidentally overextend my upper forearm muscles anytime I play anything twitchy in it, like Beat Saber or action games, and my forearm muscles stretch or tear or something and take a while to heal back up. Super annoying.
I don't think I'm doing anything too crazy with it either, so it's a little worrying, since it's happened pretty much every time I've played it lately.
> I'm adding voice recognition into the game I'm working on right now, for example.
Very cool! I've also found that it's helpful when the game supports different controllers too. I absolutely cannot play games with keyboard & mouse but plugging in an Xbox controller to the PC is completely fine. I'm sure people out there have the opposite experience as me, too.
Yeah, I can't do WASD movement that often anymore without pretty bad pain in my fingers (noticed how bad it got for the first time with Halo Infinite), so I prefer using a controller myself nowadays.
My game will definitely have controller support also (most of it does now, a few screens are a little spotty I'm planning to fix in the next month or two, and I don't yet have multiple controller support, that may have to wait until later). But it's also fully playable with just clicking a mouse as well.
I felt the exact same. The mounting pain, seemingly leading up to needing to take extended medical leave, the feeling of helplessness where interacting with computers in any capacity was excruciating, and feeling... just utterly useless was terrible. Everything I do/am felt like it involved my hands. Talon took me out of that. It was difficult to learn while in pain (if anyone reading this has the spare cycles, I highly suggest learning before you need it), but it entirely freed me from that downward spiral. It's a kind of security that (temporary) health can't quite match – knowing that the accomodations for disability are there, and are really good. Being abled is a temporary state. (For example, I lose the use of my hands while I'm eating!)
There was a book I can't recall the name of, in which one of the characters (a human) is stranded on an alien planet. He agrees to a certain type of relationship with his alien benefactor, but doesn't understand the cultural implications of what he's agreeing to. His fingers are lengthened through a medical procedure, so long that he can't hold anything, can't work, can't ever exist on his own again – he exists now only as a thing of beauty, a token for the alien to show off. He spends his days in what I picture as a courtyard in a roman villa, to be shown off to guests. This confers social status on his owner because of the resources it takes to keep a helpless sapient being fed, clothed, and happy. (The last one is debatable.) It is seen as one of the most intimate types of relationships in this culture. I think about this a lot.
For people reading this comment about RSI and considering this recommendation: please see a doctor and a physical therapist first before you adopt a gym routine. It is very, very easy to hurt yourself if you don't know what you're doing and you already have an injury. Speaking from personal experience.
The vast majority of doctors, when presented with a patient asking such a thing, will do a 30 second "examination" (if you're lucky), then spout some platitudes about exercise being beneficial in moderation (which you could have gotten from a lifestyle magazine or a fortune cookie), then usher you out after 5 minutes so they can see the next patient waiting in line.
Unless you know the doctor personally, or are rich enough to see high-class private practitioners who will actually pay attention to you because of your money and/or status, that would be a gargantuan waste of time. Needless to say, I too am speaking from personal experience.
This might be true if you just go ask a generic doctor with no training on the subject but someone trained in sports medicine or a physiotherapist can be very helpful.
I’ve found it helps to go to your doctor with a game plan. Research your issue, figure out what the desired course of diagnosis and/or treatment is, then ask for it at the doctor’s.
They will usually just give you the referral you want. They may ask you to do some wrist exercises first, but if you are persistent, it will happen.
Think of primary care as talking to first level support at the call center. If you already know your problem needs a specialist, lead the conversation in that direction.
In the US at least the most helpful is to find an out of network doctor, pay them the $200 for 1hr detailed examination, where they don't offload you to an assistant after 10 min, and use that + the offered program as a guide book, and never book another session. Much better than doing 15 in-network therapy sessions for $15 each. (hand wavy on insurance costs but you get the gist)
People always chime in with this and it's weird. It's just scaring people and making them think exercise is more dangerous than being sedentary (it isn't). Have some common sense and don't jump into something that hurts and you'll be fine. Watch some videos of how to do established exercises, start with far less weight than you think you can handle and slowly work up to a higher amount over the course of weeks (so you know you're not bending in weird ways), and be consistent with it.
You can hurt yourself doing anything. Nobody says to consult a doctor before doing anything else, but there's lots of fear mongering around exercise. Going from sitting at a desk all day to doing some weightless squats, curling tiny weights, and bench pressing a bar isn't going to ruin your body. It's only risky if you're physically disabled and already know it.
I even see people saying you should see a doctor before you start walking or jogging. No. Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong. If you just feel a burn in your muscles after a while and an ache in your muscles the next day, you're fine. You're getting stronger.
The recommendation was not "see a doctor before starting an exercise routine if you are sedentary".
It was "If you are going to try to use an intense exercise pattern as a treatment for an RSI, consult a doctor first".
> Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong.
If you have an RSI, you already have something wrong; that's your starting point. And a lot of common RSIs affecting the risk and elbow can have a lot of impact on ability to safely do lots of common exercises (especially with free weights) at weights way (like, literally, an order of magnitude or more) below what would even be useful from a strength perspective. And, yeah, the right focused exercises can help, and if you've got a decent doctor, they (or, more likely, the physical therapist they refer you to), will actually provide you both appropriate exercises for your particular RSI and also appropriate guidelines on how to avoid exacerbating it with other exercise.
Don't let hubris get in the way of getting an informed medical opinion when it comes to not making your existing injuries worse with exercise. I'm speaking from experience as someone who once thought like you do, at least when it came to my own health. Take injuries seriously.
Right, I think a good takeaway is: In extreme cases of anything, you are likely to want to get doctor input -- but presently "seeing the doctor" is in no way a guarantee of anything?
More like, do your homework on whatever it that's wrong with you. Often, a doctor's input is very helpful, but that too comes with limitations and caveats.
The two times I had RSI it actually turned out to be a postural issue. I never would have figured that out without going to physical therapists, who were able to figure it out in 15 minutes. They gave me specific instructions on how to hold my body and some exercises to do, and things cleared up in a few weeks.
RSI and similar mean there's something specific that needs fixing. PTs can dramatically speed up that process; trying to solve it on your own can result in more damage simply because you're not fixing the problem.
I'd agree that exercise is all well and good. But you should also make sure you're fixing the right problem.
It has been a while, so I don't remember the exact details. In both cases, the symptoms were pain and paraesthesia in my hands and lower arm, although the locations might have been somewhat different. In one, the issue was that I was holding my head and neck forward, sort of cantilevered out. This caused muscle inflammation in the back of my neck, irritating a nearby nerve. In the other, it had to do with holding my shoulders forward, causing a nerve impingement on my chest. In both cases, it was part of an overall hunched-forward posture, so... you know, "don't do that". :-) I don't remember the specific exercises, but I think they had something to do with strengthening opposing muscles.
Doctors and PTs never helped my wrist, forearm, and arm pain but finding a really good personal trainer and going to the gym 3+ times a week for several months is what finally did it
The doctors just prescribed the PT and the PTs had me doing basic stretches that ChatGPT would done a better job with
No no some doctor with their 8 or more years of formal professional education knows nothing compared with some rando on the internet who may have read a book by some other rando and has an anecdotal testimonial. This is patently true because I read it on my corner of the internet all the time. And sometimes hear it on talk radio.
There are almost no medical contraindications to exercise, so this is meh advice. Feel free to consult professionals, but there is no need to abstain from exercise due to fear of doing something "wrong".
Obviously don't do things clearly aggravating your symptoms, but there is no magic diagnostic that would make a doctor tell you you can't exercise because of your wrists.
I would also advise seeing a doctor but I'll say my doctor recommended me something very similar. I'm not able to go to the gym but what has helped me is I have a bucket with rice in it (I guess you could also use sand?) and I just twist my hand within the bucket of rice while holding and squeezing a tennis ball in it. Do it in a circular motion.
One thing I thought was interesting is he said that ortho doctors don't really think ergo keyboards help. I use a kinesis advantage 360 where I can (I still prefer a regular keyboard) I don't see much in the way beyond help with shoulder pain. I've had surgery to fix my RSI/ tunnel nerve inflammation. Anyways where I'm going with this is I do think exercise is a big help.
No one setup helped me either. What did help me was recognizing that I had a problem and actively changing things - like varying small setup changes like angle to the table. That was mostly enough to stop stressing always the same parts.
The Kinesis (and now the Moonlander) has really helped with the pain in my hands from severe nerve damage (from a coma) though. I understand it's not exactly RSI, so the mechanism is different. I agree with you about exercise. At this point, I'm nervous to rely on just one single change, so a multi-frontal attack is needed. A consistent stretching routine is probably what helped me deal with pain the most...
The thing that seems to counteract my wrist pain is pulling exercises. Essentially anything where the wrist is pulled away from the forearm: pull ups, deadlifts, bent over rows, even stretches against the wall. Pushing against the wrist made things worse for me, but the pulling exercises counteract it.
I couldn't do push-ups when starting with a personal trainer due to the wrist pain, but the exercises helped; I'm not sure if it was pulling action, or grip strength / forearm training though; the theory with the latter is that the large muscles pick up more of the slack and offload the smaller painful muscles.
that, or just improved blood flow allowing repairs and trapped shit to be taken away.
I had bad RSI for ages. What helps me and other comments have agreed is pulling excercises. Specifically I have a bar at home attached to the ceiling. Just hanging from the bar as long as you can and doing that regularly seems to stretch out the right muscles/tendons. Don't over do it but at the beginning I could only do 20 seconds. Now I can hold on for 1 to 2 minutes depending on the day.
I have very little wrist pain any more.
I also have a kinesis pro keyboard and a MX master mouse. They both add to the improvement.
This is interesting, it reminds me of the (sort of) famous "tree hanging" exercise. Which goes like this. Go to a wooded area, find a tree with a strong branch above your head. Grab it and hang off it for a while. Do it daily for a brief time.
Supposedly this exercise helps in all sorts of problems that arise in a sedentary lifestyle (hands, arms, back etc).
Now, the only problem with doing it here is that most trees here are pines and strong branches start 20m above the ground...
You can get a climbing hangboard and hang it over a doorway. Do a pyramid training (2, 4, 6, 8, 6, 4, 2s with 5s pause in between) and your fingers and wrists will get much stronger
I use a Beastmaker 1000 hangboard and follow the Emil's Sub-max Daily Fingerboard Routine on the app Crimpd each day. Absolutely amazing results within a month. I really suggest everyone gives it a try.
You can also do it in the gym, if they have one of the "machines" shown at the very right in this picture: https://www.fit-star.de/Resources/Public/Content/Specials/He... - not sure how they're called or how common they are, but you put your lower arms on the armrests, grab the handles, rest your back against the blue ball and just let your legs hang. Then you can do some ab exercises.
Flip side to this, is I’ve had Carpal Tunnel for a while now, had surgery 2 years ago. It’s somewhat better and I am now active at the gym and in general it has helped a lot but extreme gripping such as deadhangs, deadlifts and heavy rows actually aggravates my symptoms. I started using straps for any weight over 50kg and my hands have got a lot better.
I’ve found that when you’re going from (weak, sedentary) => (strong, active) it can sometimes be difficult to discern what activities are good or bad for your pain. Sometimes you need to work through pain to find relief and strength on the other side, but sometimes working through pain just leads to more pain. The boundaries aren’t always clear at the time.
Yes..don't push past your pain limits. I have an old elbow injury from climbing. In the past if I did too much with it like pull ups it would inflame and then be useless again for weeks.
But slowly building up the hang time and then moving to 1 pull-up then to 2 and slowly over months to 5 and then 10 seems to keep it happy.
Be careful and slow but consistent and results should be good.
I also fixed my RSI issues with exercise, though I get a lot more benefit from cardio.
I find it extremely helpful to take a mid-workday walk, ~20 minutes, usually after lunch. My brain turns off to digest anyway, so I lose little useful work time. Adopting the walk pretty much solved my issue.
I speculate that my issues are blood-flow related - I’ve always had cold hands/feet, suggesting suboptimal circulation. All the prolonged sitting then starves the muscles in my wrists of the oxygen needed to keep typing. Roughly in line with this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16640514/
Obviously, there are many possible root causes for RSI conditions. But a midday walk is a nice thing regardless, and may be worth a try.
Interesting, I've been coding professionally for about 20 years now, and never had any wrist problems. I've been pretty inconsistent with working out, but have always kept a pull up bar in my home, and even when not working out often I do a few pull ups here and there. Maybe these things are related. Never really thought about it.
Strengthening is definitely a huge part of it if not most .. more often than not.
A few other things helped, if you have them use your benefits to verify with a physiotherapist or professional.
Wrist support:
M-brace makes an excellent and minimally invasive strap. Good to west while sleeping if you twist it while sleeping. There’s an older version of this which was an angled bracket which works in many positions. Helps relieve from fatigue or not get fatigued as easily.
Laptops are generally awful ergonomics especially if you aren’t as active as may need to be. Invest in an ergonomic keyboards, ergomice, vertical mice, trackpads. Variety is the best ergonomics. Minimize or stop using laptop keyboards. I use Logitech k860, Microsoft ErgoSculpt keyboard, kinesis freestyle widest separation at times, even though they are not mechanical. Slim keys are actually pretty good.
If you have a standing desk use it more often to change up the angles and use different muscles.
Strengthening:
- A gyroball works well. Builds up the core muscles.
I've found this true for a lot of unexpected things. It makes sense in the end, but is a little unintuitive at first that lots of deadlifting completely fixed some crippling back pain I was going through at one point.
Competitive RTS, programming and being able to stand on my hands for minutes at the time left me with wrists that hurt all the time.
After I started climbing all wrist and back pain has disappeared.
>It fixes most modern afflictions of sedentary < 60 years old people
Under physical therapy supervision, my >60-year old mother is exercising fairly vigorously (for her age) and has been seeing great improvements in her overall health and strength, so don't let age be a factor and get professional help if needed.
Oh yeah for sure, it's just that with age more and more things have more to do with luck and genetics than exercise, but it's still extremely important of course.
My remedy for the RSI in my right hand (stiffness and pain in the fingers and knuckles) is gripping as hard as possible. If I work out I remind myself to grip everything as hard as I possibly can, and I add light dumbbell exercises so I can specifically focus on gripping as hard as possible. If I'm at my desk or wherever I also occasionally make a fist as hard and tense as I can. The pain has gone away and my hand has its full range of motion again. Of course, for all I know I could be doing something wrong and my hand will blow out in a few years. Just adding my anecdotal experience.
This style of writing feels a lot like the sections of Gödel Escher Bach that had the tortoise and Achilles dialogues.
Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.
I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.
I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.
Same here, I got a bout of severe RSI almost 15 years ago, for a few months
I changed many habits and it's been gone since then ... It's obviously different for everyone but I found that using a trackball helped a lot. For awhile I had a mouse on the left and trackball on the right, switching back and forth. But I don't need that anymore.
Taking breaks and minding posture is important. Wrist posture in particular -- I don't rest my wrists or arms on anything -- only my fingers make contact with the keyboard.
Much later, I started weight training with kettle bells, and I noticed a pretty nice improvement in strength / circulation.
> I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.
That's one of the biggest takeaways I had from playing bass guitar in high school, actually. If you can delegate the movement to a bigger muscle group, it's generally a good idea do so. Shoulder/back instead of arm, arm instead of hand, hand instead of finger...
Similar things in martial arts. A strong punch comes from the hips and the shoulder. The elbow and wrist just come along for the ride and need to stabilize to survive.
The author intentionally does that, if you go to the character page you can see they’re supposed to reflect a Socrates and student dialogue. Pretty clever imo.
This. I had problems with back pain, neck pain and RSI about 10 years ago. I learned to sit up straight, corrected my desk height and rearranged stuff on my desk so I'm not typing like a shrimp. I also realized I really don't need to type as much as I did.
Can you please stop breaking the site guidelines like this? We've already had to warn you about this exact thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37358816, and we end up having to ban accounts that won't fix such issues.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." and also this one:
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Has anyone had any experience using this in a shared workspace? I think it would be awesome to learn, but I don't see it working well for me in an open plan working area.
At some level, this is my insurance against ever working in an open office ever again. If an employer really does want me to work in an open office, I will just maliciously comply and get nothing done because the recognition just won't work.
Collaboration doesn't have to rely on everyone being in the same room or building.
At times I've even seen better collaboration between random open source maintainers working together than some of the companies where everyone was in an open office floorplan.
Surprisingly, everybody can have their own opinions about what they think is the best workspace for them. I find it difficult to focus in loud places. All of the open offices I've worked in have been loud places. I'm sure there are open offices that are not loud places, but luck of the draw, I have not seen that.
If you like working in an open office, that's great for you. I don't.
I've actually seen this work quite well, in terms of voice recognition. The commands are specific enough and a lavalier / directed microphone can filter out most of the surrounding noise. Whether other people will be as happy with you speaking gibberish, that I can't say.
"Emacs pinky" lasts not more than five seconds after binding the oversized, wrongly
placed, totally useless Caps Lock key to send Control instead, the way God intended.
I like putting the modifier keys (shift, ctrl, win, alt) underneath the home row keys using tap-hold functionality. (e.g. tapping 'f' outputs 'f', but holding 'f' acts as 'shift').
I use an external keyboard, & haven't tried kmonad.
I don't run into HRM even at over 100 wpm, on Dvorak. (I'd expect Dvorak to use home row more than qwerty), whereas one user in that thread said he needed to resort to a fork in order to use them.
I read that more as configuring tap-hold is difficult, and that perhaps some typing styles don't suit current implementations. -- I know that if I type "down a, down o, down e, up a, up o, up e" I get "aoe", and afaiu that's different than "must type staccato" that the issue raises.
It is partially possible with Karabiner Elements. The part that's possible is you need a minimum hold delay before __f__ turns into __Shift__, but otherwise it works without breaking your typing
The other part of no-delay without breaking your typing style should also be possible in the software, but don't know of a great solution there
Sounds more like the Devil: you're replaced one bad design with another, there is no point in using pinky sideways hold (so some of the worse ergonomic components) for such a common key
Better to use home row mods, control prefix as a thumb key, or modal key sequencers instead is key combos
Home row mods is a superior solution but not every Emacs user is tech-savvy enough to know how to get home row mods. Emacs users come in all forms. There are authors, researchers, people from humanities who use Emacs. Only a few weeks ago I was reading about someone in the fashion industry who uses Emacs. I don't think most of them would be interested to figure out how to get home row mods.
Replacing CapsLock with Ctrl works for many Emacs users who cannot create mods or carry around an external ergonomic keyboard with them everywhere they go. I know it does not work for all but it works for many.
What really is a bad design is to have precious keyboard real estate wasted by the CapsLock key. Anything that changes that is some improvement on it even if that is mapping CapsLock to Ctrl and using pinky sideways. We use the pinky sideways anyway with Shift, Enter, Tab, ... Adding one more key to sideways pinky does not make it a "bad design".
You've ignored other alternatives that would work better than a capslock even for the less tech-savvy crowd
> Adding one more key to sideways pinky does not make it a "bad design".
Of course it does, and you mentioning other bad designs (by the way,you can also remap those) doesn't change this basic fact of keyboard ergonomics: it's bad because you're using very inconvenient key for very frequent operations
> You've ignored other alternatives that would work better than a capslock even for the less tech-savvy crowd
What are those alternatives? Why talk in riddles when you can simply share those alternatives?
I'm looking at a mac user's keyboard settings right now and the only built in options I can find for Ctrl are Caps Lock, Option, Command, Function. If they want to have a better Ctrl experience which of these other alternatives should I suggest them? Install a new tool only to manage key bindings? I've already lost their attention!
> it's bad because you're using very inconvenient key for very frequent operations
Says who? I don't turn my CapsLock to Ctrl but every longtime CapsLock-as-Ctrl user I know swear by them. They say in person and online that CapsLock to Ctrl helped them get over RSI.
How do you decide for them that it's bad for them? You could say that CapsLock to Ctrl is bad for you. I just don't understand how you could proclaim that it is bad for me and others.
> What are those alternatives? Why talk in riddles when you can simply share those alternatives?
I have, you only had to read a short 2nd sentence of the original comment, they're listed after the comma separator
> Says who?
Who do you need to state this obvious and well publicised fact that lateral/pinky motions are unergonomic??? Though it does explain your later misunderstandings and confusing relative and absolute again
I read that and found it to be not relevant to non-tech-savvy users. Well the problem is how do you really make them alter their keyboard so that control prefix is now a thumb key without sacrificing something else?
Like in the settings I pulled up in the other comment, I could ask them to make their Command or Option as Ctrl. But after doing that, they lose some other key (command or option) from the thumb key which is important too. Both command and option are important and frequent enough to be thumb keys. There is no clear winner about which key should go here.
> or modal key sequencers instead is key combos
Like which ones exactly? Can you name some names? Do you mean like Evil or god-mode? There's a lot of choices there and I know users who use one or the other. But many don't like to change the modeless editing to modal editing such packages invariable force upon you.
Much better is to just enable sticky keys which all major OS seem to be support. But again not everyone likes them. Who am I to tell them otherwise if they have tried both and prefer CapsLock as Control more than sticky keys?
***
Like I said earlier the real travesty is the wastage of real estate with the CapsLock key. The stock keyboards come with this travesty. I see anything that changes that as improvement even if it is making CapsLock to be Ctrl and using pinky sideways.
Making CapsLock as Ctrl is the least invasive choice for them. I'm not surprised that most people do this. I'm genuinely surprised that you would go as far as proclaiming this to be universally bad.
> Who do you need to state this obvious and well publicised fact that lateral/pinky motions are unergonomic?
Again, says who? I mean why is your word more important than those who swear by lateral pinky? Care to link to some research that establishes this as a "fact"?
I'm already at the home row all the time. The key under discussion is three millimeters to the left of 'a', where my pinky usually already is. If that small a distance is ever a problem, it's a valuable signal that I need to find an orthopedist in a hurry.
If you're already at the home row, why not use the finger at the home row where you finger already is 0mm to the left of itself??? It can even serve the same role of a valuable signal
Emacs being Emacs it is possible to change how Emacs behaves for every key you type. Evil mode is a fantastic example of how you can emulate most of Vi within Emacs! But it's not the only game in town.
If you don't want to buy into the whole Vi and modal editing thing there are plethora of packages to have better key bindings. To name a few: god-mode, devil-mode, meow, hydra, general, spacemacs. Pick any from this and you don't have to worry about key chording anymore.
Not to put a damper on how cool this is (or bring up AI for the nth time), but I think GPT4 has mostly solved this problem, and you don't even need to learn a new UI! For instance, GPT4 integrated into my IDE has a hit rate of close to 100% for translating english into code for simple things that the article mentions, such as creating new functions, moving arguments around, etc. (I feel silly using such a powerful tool for such simple tasks, but I often ask GPT4 to do tasks that I'm too lazy or don't want to hit all the keystrokes for, like converting an anonymous function to a lambda or whatever.) I suppose that the only difference is that it's not quite as fast, yet :)
Notwithstanding the last few decades of trend, many people still want certain data/behavior to stay firmly within a device they (supposedly) own and control, as opposed to owning a dumb-terminal.
I don't think that's true. Latency is critical when the limiting factor is that you know what you want to do but in order to do it, you need to issue many requests all at once. With GPT4 I can issue requests at a high enough level that the limiting factor is actually me thinking of what the next request will be.
Huh? I understand that latency is a limiting factor for Cursorless, I'm not arguing with that. I'm saying that if you're using GPT, latency stops being the limiting factor most of the time.
I'm seriously trying to do this but I keep struggling with integrating AI. I find it's constantly messing up or just not understanding what I'm asking. Mind going in depth about how you integrated GPT4? I'm using go-pilot and I recently got a GPT4 sub but I find myself writing a very long prompt over and over until I get a general idea of what I could do.
Just for example I need to check for environment in js if it's prod, it did some statement like
(environment === 'prod' || environment === 'prod-blue etc etc.
I stripped it all down to just environment.includes('prod') lol.
Another is just say if you're dealing with an api that returns a string for 'true' instead of true. It wrote a huge function about this...
I didn't want to say it in my initial post because I feared I would be downvoted for people thinking I was just spamming AI products. (I got downvoted anyways, so I guess it didn't matter.) I just use the Cursor IDE though, it's fabulous if you already use VSCode. And yeah I have no association with Cursor.
Cursor is pretty smart about what to prompt GPT with. In the case that you described, you might prompt it with something like "check for prod" and I expect it would work. The reason it would have a better success rate is that it's usually quite good about what context to send over - it would likely pick up the type definitions (if you have those) or other files that do similar things and send those over as well.
To give a full answer to your question, I actually wouldn't prompt it with "check for prod" at all because that would be underutilizing GPT. I would probably prompt at the complexity level of something like "edit this component so that if we're in prod, we show a warning message at the top". I would expect GPT to do that accurately for a component up to 100-200 lines virtually every time.
So this utilizes the tree-sitter AST and performs operations on the "parts" of the buffer? This, then, is very similar to textobjects in vim / evil, but with a spoken component.
I can see a lot of promise in this. Particularly if this integrates a sort of "record and perform" feature. Say I'm doing action X with my keyboard, and I know I need to do Y after, and 1) I can see all the required text on the screen, 2) it's a simple operation. I could then speak the command for Y while executing X, and then press the button to execute the voice command after I finish X. Much better than having to alternate between typing and speaking.
Alternately typing and speaking would lead to using different parts of our cognition, and writing software isn't very verbal once you've grokked the syntax. Instead, if one can type and speak at the same time, it'll work everything and make achieving a flow state much easier. Sort of like rubber ducking on steroids.
Emacs is pretty good in the other direction (can type, can't see) thanks to Emacspeak.
But it's going to be a while before Emacs can catch up in this domain. The display engine can't handle cursorless-style notation, and the tree-sitter integration is not mature yet.
If Cursorless is alien magic from the future, and JPEG is alien technology from the future, then this blog demonstrates the perils of combining magic and technology. The blurry dots make my head hurt.
Nice. Don’t have to have RSI to appreciate this. I think I prefer this to learning vim shortcuts. I would rather say U than Urge so I don’t need to think but the phonetic alphabet would do I guess.
The same reason pilots say "fower" instead of "four" and soldiers "foxtrot" instead of "eff" - a good spelling alphabet is much clearer and ambiguity-free than English letter names. Getting into speculation here, I expect the reason they use their own alphabet instead of something like the NATO phonetic alphabet is a matter of use case: unlike radio communications, transcription provides immediate, unambiguous feedback (the letters show up on your screen) and mistakes are low-impact and easily corrected, so a degree of clarity is sacrificed in exchange for improved speed.
Because they talk over noisy, distorted channels that have about 3 kHz bandwidth, in environments that are noisy to begin with?
You can talk to your PC in 16 bit (or more) audio sampled at 48 kHz, with a decent microphone, in a relatively quiet environment. Moreover, it could be tailored to understand your voice specifically, not just anyone saying "U".
When you're combining letter names with other commands, even in perfect recording conditions, there will be confusion. The command "back Q" sounds very very close to "back U", but "back quench" is different than "back urge".
In either case, you're using the same number of syllables, so there isn't any speed lost. You just have to spend a day learning the alphabet.
"back U", or perhaps more pertinently "black U", is not very close to "black Q". They are phonetically distinct. "black U" has no stop; in "black Q" there is a stop between the words. The final plosive of "black" is deleted so it becomes something similar to "bla ' kyu", whereas the other one is "blakyu".
In 2023, if whatever you're using doesn't listen for stops, here is a dime, get yourself a better speech recognizer?
I'm not learning any phonetic alphabet other than the ICAO standard one.
If I ever have to use that one, I will look like a fool if that nonstandard one starts slipping in by mistake.
Not cursorless specifically, but there is a great talk and demonstration about programming by voice here[0]. It's mesmerizing to watch. The speaker does a great job talking about the current commmon issues in the area too.
I remember that talk! They also have a channel with some more videos but unfortunately do not do coding by voice anymore: https://www.youtube.com/@mccGoNZooo
what's wrong with just saying what you want to select in this example
select "function fetchBlog". If the recognition is slightly off for example "fetch Buhk" use some Levenstein to find the best match
> Newcomers to voice coding often ask why not use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet
> With one exception, all the NATO words have more than one syllable (e.g., November has three) and are not efficient for commands like the alphabet that you will use frequently
- Get a TKL keyboard, those extra 5 inches to stretch to your mouse are important
- Or try using your mouse IN FRONT of your keyboard, like, I usually have mine turned 90' counter-clockwise and resting somewhere under my left "Alt" key. If you never used it that way it may feel weird for like 5 minutes. Then it's natural for eternity
- And get a mechanical keyboard ("red" switches should be okay for most people)
Have you considered using a Trackpoint instead of a mouse? To me it's the most comfortable way to move a pointer on the screen, and coupled with a keyboard-driven GUI, I rarely have to rely on it anyway. This seems like the most ergonomic setup to me, and I haven't experienced any hand discomfort after many years of using it.
> And get a mechanical keyboard
I'm not convinced that mechanical keyboards help with reducing RSI, since they usually require more actuation force and key travel. I've found slim keyboards with low key travel, whether mechanical or membrane, to be the most comfortable to type on for extended periods of time.
It's exactly what i've been doing for the last 12 years. IBM Spacesaver keyboards + vim keybindings everywhere possible, and during the year, stretching forearms everyday.
> "Have you considered using a Trackpoint instead of a mouse?"
A mouse is a proxy for the pointer, you move the mouse and that moves the pointer a scaled amount, precisely, distance-for-distance predictable movement. A trackpoint is a joystick, you lean it in a direction and the pointer goes in that direction and you have to work with the timing and guess when to let go for the pointer to stop in the place you want. It's like controlling a pointer by poking it with a bouncy spring, there could hardly be a worse mismatch.
The opposite version of the mismatch is trying to control a driving game with a mouse, where the car only steers left as long as the mouse is actively moving left, so you have to continually swipe the mouse and pick it up and reswipe over and over to go round a corner.
Joysticks are not a good fit to control a mouse pointer.
> A trackpoint is a joystick, you lean it in a direction and the pointer goes in that direction and you have to work with the timing and guess when to let go for the pointer to stop in the place you want.
Have you ever used a Trackpoint? It's more than a joystick. It's pressure sensitive, which means that you can quickly cross large distances, or be precise across smaller ones, by adjusting the exerted pressure. There's no guessing where the pointer will stop, since there's no deceleration, and you're almost[1] always in full control.
I agree that it's less precise than a mouse, but not by much once you're used to it. I'd trade the comfort of always keeping my hands on the keyboard for a slight decrease in precision any day. And this is even less of a problem if you optimize your workflow to use keyboard-driven UIs as much as possible.
[1]: The only issue I have with it is that it ocasionally gets "stuck" in one direction, which fixes itself after a second of letting go of it. It's possibly related to dirt or dust, because of its high sensitivity, but I haven't found that cleaning helps much. Though this might be only an issue on ThinkPad laptops, which Lenovo hasn't cared to fix for many years now.
Joysticks are pressure sensitive, the speed of e.g. game aircraft roll is proportional to how far you lean the joystick. Yes I have used a trackpoint, that's why I dislike it so much.
You know when moving a mouse to resize a column in some data view, only the developers made it so the hit target is a single pixel and it's excruciating to try and hit it? A trackpoint is like that all the time, for every use case.
Re [1], if the pressure is constant for about a second the software assumes that you aren't touching it and what remains is error in the hardware. It then compensates for the error by introducing a constant offset which exactly counteracts your motion. The only way to fix it is to let go until the software recalibrates to the actual error with zero pressure. Since learning this I've mostly avoided it without consciously changing my behaviour.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadI tried your standard r.i.c.e, taubmann technique, ultrasound, TENS units, easing up on my activities, EVERYTHING. The only thing that really helped me at the end was a book called the trigger point therapy workbook. TPT basically emphasizes using a form of deep tissue massage to attempt to break up residual scar tissue and increase blood flow.
I've been using it as a preventative form of medicine, and I have been RSI free for years now.
I've been practically a 16-hours a day computer user for near 40 years now...combined with playing instruments and video games. I've never had wrist, hand or eye problems.
I consider myself extremely fortunate/lucky. OTOH loud music has turned my hearing to utter shit.
I am also a 16 hour a day computer user and used to be a musician and I've had bouts of "ouch" from playing video games and also from lifting weights or riding a bike a long distance. Lifting weights is a good ouch generally, playing video games is a bad one. But my most downvoted comment is a response to someone being really dismissive about ear damage from loud music. I was in a band and it kind of messed up my ears. I don't have RSI and consider myself lucky, I can still work because my job is typing.
The comment that set me off was "how about simply not playing so fucking loud?"
I would like you to look at the parallels between your comment and the one that set me off, and look at my response and look at how a response from someone who IS suffering from it would see your response and realize how it's just... not helpful. "how about just don't get hurt like I didn't?" Easy! Just invent time travel and don't do that thing that hurt you. You can make choices and you can take precautions. But I did not wear ear plugs at shows because I wanted to hear everything and usually did but sometimes didn't wear ear plugs at band practice and that was very dumb. At the time, I thought it was important to hear it as it was in the room. Listening to the buzz in my ears now, mayyyybe I was wrong about that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517355
For what it's worth, I've also been using computers all day for 25 years and didn't get a lick of RSI. I am also wondering what I'm doing differently. Maybe finding that out can help the people who did get it.
In my case, I think it helps that my elbows are resting on the table always, and I take care that my hands/wrists don't need to be in a weird position for me to type. I did learn to type badly (basically typing at an angle), but maybe that means that my wrists were more comfortable that way.
This is another way of saying "It didn't happen to me because I do something special."
You don't see an issue with the parent comment because...you have the same viewpoint.
I assume you prayed over it, at least.
All I was saying was that I've found it difficult at times to empathize even though I know that I should. I'm admitting my failure to be a good person here. And my "OTOH" comment was a recognition of being a hypocrite. I'm saying sorry without groveling about it.
It is possible, those of us who have been nerds from an early age develop with body skeleto-muscular structure that is more forgiving to this lifestyle.
2 bouts of RSI that I suspect were psychosomatic.
As regards hearing: you should buy a few sets of nice re-usable earplugs to keep what you still have. My hearing is still great for my age but I do notice a difference from when I was younger - a few years ago I stopped hearing transformer whine (which was nice) but it was a stark reminder of the fidelity that I'd lost.
I'm glad you wrote it up, and that it got to the front page here strikes me as HN working as intended.
I didn't actually write this up per se :P Technically, I dictated it and there's probably some gnarly typos with homophones in there that I haven't totally eliminated because it was a bit of a fire and forget piece, where I was just dumping my thoughts on a topic.
And yeah, even notwithstanding the massive accessibility benefit, I can see use in learning it just for the sake of a new lens on how to navigate code. Sort of the same reason I'm looking forward to the big Emacs 29 update on all my machines around the end of the year - among other things, I get to find out firsthand whether I'm as excited as I should be for first class tree-sitter, or not excited enough.
But for VS Code folks, this is already right there and I can't imagine not wanting to play around at least a bit with it and see what it can do.
Farmer walks are amazing and I encourage people to do them more. Deadlifts are awesome for all kinds of reasons too; walks are definitely not a replacement, just a great alternative as far as hands go.
I started strength training this year, for other reasons. Using a rowing machine irritated my fingers, so I thought I'd have to avoid things like deadlifts and pullups. But I started using heavy clubs, which really work the grip but with the force pulling in a different direction. I've at least doubled my grip strength with those, and my fingers are a lot better now in general. (Now I'm doing deadlifts and rows too.)
Other things that helped before this:
- Switching to mech keyboards, and training myself to type without bottoming out the keys. When the problem first developed it was so bad I worried my career was ending. Mech keyboards fixed that.
- Holding my hands in ice water for ten minutes each, once a day. First two minutes are super painful, then the rest isn't bad. After a while you get used to it and the first part is all right too. That was more for acute relief when it was getting bad, and it made a huge difference. I've seen at least one study saying it works, too.
After trying many things, the thing that helped me the most was switching to a super low pressure rubber dome keyboard and typing softly. I use a Sun Type 7 but really any keyboard with super low pressure keys would probably do.
I had no idea such tools existed and even though I don't have RSI (yet), it's going to change the way I work.
I assume I'll just get used to it over time.
Were they bad, or did the VS code solution just seem much better?
Here are some of my most useful remaps:
- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"
- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).
- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.
- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.
- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.
I use Karabiner for Mac to do my remappings.
Even though, as I wrote above, Emacs does not require finger contortions, I do do finger contortions. I doubt I'll ever stop using Emacs but I have always been a little concerned about my little fingers ("pinkies"). So the options seem to be either evil mode, or a new keyboard, both of which require busting a decade's worth of muscle memory...
Quite a while ago I remember talk about making the LSP server work for other editors by avoiding importing vscode.
I know for me I to see these kinds of setups (like every eMacs setup) and realize that my neuro divergence is very different than others
I freeze in awe at how much context and abstractions you have to keep in your head to just navigate and grok what’s happening. It’s like three layers of abstraction and having decades of fluency in a language and IDE/CLI.
“ After a while, they just become second nature like Vim commands do. I have been forcing myself to use this over and over again for the past few days and it's starting to become second nature.”
Ha yeah that does seem like what it would take to learn to use this.
I’ve been making computers go brrrr for 30 years and this level of coding fluency will never not confuse and impress me.
Kudos!!
I want to see a study teaching people to code using their voice versus with typing and then also by hand.
I'm not too interested in Cursorless I don't use VSCode and vim/evil mode text objects are equally powerful (and less visually noisy). Very excited by this whole concept.
- Tenting split keyboard (Goldtouch V2)
- Vertical mouse (Evoluent)
- Strength training (Les Mills Body Pump class)
- Desk & chair at the proper height for me
- Keeping my body and arms warm throughout the day, especially at night while asleep
- Switching from Emacs to JetBrains editors
I hope you can solve your RSI issues. Thanks for the article. Good luck!
[1] https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/
Then for the overlays to always be visible.
I got stuck somewhere though.
Also, I love the style of this blog with the chat-replies from friends.
You don't necessarily have to do that. I'm adding voice recognition into the game I'm working on right now, for example. It helps that it's a turn-based strategy game to begin with, though.
And there are players that manage to play games with limited or no mobility in their hands at all, with the right accessible controllers.
I don't think I'm doing anything too crazy with it either, so it's a little worrying, since it's happened pretty much every time I've played it lately.
Very cool! I've also found that it's helpful when the game supports different controllers too. I absolutely cannot play games with keyboard & mouse but plugging in an Xbox controller to the PC is completely fine. I'm sure people out there have the opposite experience as me, too.
My game will definitely have controller support also (most of it does now, a few screens are a little spotty I'm planning to fix in the next month or two, and I don't yet have multiple controller support, that may have to wait until later). But it's also fully playable with just clicking a mouse as well.
There was a book I can't recall the name of, in which one of the characters (a human) is stranded on an alien planet. He agrees to a certain type of relationship with his alien benefactor, but doesn't understand the cultural implications of what he's agreeing to. His fingers are lengthened through a medical procedure, so long that he can't hold anything, can't work, can't ever exist on his own again – he exists now only as a thing of beauty, a token for the alien to show off. He spends his days in what I picture as a courtyard in a roman villa, to be shown off to guests. This confers social status on his owner because of the resources it takes to keep a helpless sapient being fed, clothed, and happy. (The last one is debatable.) It is seen as one of the most intimate types of relationships in this culture. I think about this a lot.
Unless you know the doctor personally, or are rich enough to see high-class private practitioners who will actually pay attention to you because of your money and/or status, that would be a gargantuan waste of time. Needless to say, I too am speaking from personal experience.
That would indeed come under people who aren't "The vast majority of doctors".
They will usually just give you the referral you want. They may ask you to do some wrist exercises first, but if you are persistent, it will happen.
Think of primary care as talking to first level support at the call center. If you already know your problem needs a specialist, lead the conversation in that direction.
You can hurt yourself doing anything. Nobody says to consult a doctor before doing anything else, but there's lots of fear mongering around exercise. Going from sitting at a desk all day to doing some weightless squats, curling tiny weights, and bench pressing a bar isn't going to ruin your body. It's only risky if you're physically disabled and already know it.
I even see people saying you should see a doctor before you start walking or jogging. No. Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong. If you just feel a burn in your muscles after a while and an ache in your muscles the next day, you're fine. You're getting stronger.
The recommendation was not "see a doctor before starting an exercise routine if you are sedentary".
It was "If you are going to try to use an intense exercise pattern as a treatment for an RSI, consult a doctor first".
> Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong.
If you have an RSI, you already have something wrong; that's your starting point. And a lot of common RSIs affecting the risk and elbow can have a lot of impact on ability to safely do lots of common exercises (especially with free weights) at weights way (like, literally, an order of magnitude or more) below what would even be useful from a strength perspective. And, yeah, the right focused exercises can help, and if you've got a decent doctor, they (or, more likely, the physical therapist they refer you to), will actually provide you both appropriate exercises for your particular RSI and also appropriate guidelines on how to avoid exacerbating it with other exercise.
Are you not physically disabled in some way though if you have RSI?
More like, do your homework on whatever it that's wrong with you. Often, a doctor's input is very helpful, but that too comes with limitations and caveats.
RSI and similar mean there's something specific that needs fixing. PTs can dramatically speed up that process; trying to solve it on your own can result in more damage simply because you're not fixing the problem.
I'd agree that exercise is all well and good. But you should also make sure you're fixing the right problem.
The doctors just prescribed the PT and the PTs had me doing basic stretches that ChatGPT would done a better job with
Now I have back pain, wrist pain, and tennis elbow.
Obviously don't do things clearly aggravating your symptoms, but there is no magic diagnostic that would make a doctor tell you you can't exercise because of your wrists.
One thing I thought was interesting is he said that ortho doctors don't really think ergo keyboards help. I use a kinesis advantage 360 where I can (I still prefer a regular keyboard) I don't see much in the way beyond help with shoulder pain. I've had surgery to fix my RSI/ tunnel nerve inflammation. Anyways where I'm going with this is I do think exercise is a big help.
Of course, every person and diagnosis is different.
that, or just improved blood flow allowing repairs and trapped shit to be taken away.
I have very little wrist pain any more.
I also have a kinesis pro keyboard and a MX master mouse. They both add to the improvement.
variation of this - my wife half my weight does her Aikido exercises on my wrists when the wrists start to remind about themselves.
Supposedly this exercise helps in all sorts of problems that arise in a sedentary lifestyle (hands, arms, back etc).
Now, the only problem with doing it here is that most trees here are pines and strong branches start 20m above the ground...
I’ve found that when you’re going from (weak, sedentary) => (strong, active) it can sometimes be difficult to discern what activities are good or bad for your pain. Sometimes you need to work through pain to find relief and strength on the other side, but sometimes working through pain just leads to more pain. The boundaries aren’t always clear at the time.
But slowly building up the hang time and then moving to 1 pull-up then to 2 and slowly over months to 5 and then 10 seems to keep it happy.
Be careful and slow but consistent and results should be good.
( See your doctor of physio for advice )
I find it extremely helpful to take a mid-workday walk, ~20 minutes, usually after lunch. My brain turns off to digest anyway, so I lose little useful work time. Adopting the walk pretty much solved my issue.
I speculate that my issues are blood-flow related - I’ve always had cold hands/feet, suggesting suboptimal circulation. All the prolonged sitting then starves the muscles in my wrists of the oxygen needed to keep typing. Roughly in line with this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16640514/
Obviously, there are many possible root causes for RSI conditions. But a midday walk is a nice thing regardless, and may be worth a try.
Strengthening is definitely a huge part of it if not most .. more often than not.
A few other things helped, if you have them use your benefits to verify with a physiotherapist or professional.
Wrist support:
M-brace makes an excellent and minimally invasive strap. Good to west while sleeping if you twist it while sleeping. There’s an older version of this which was an angled bracket which works in many positions. Helps relieve from fatigue or not get fatigued as easily.
https://m-brace.com/produit/wrist-support-132/
Laptops are generally awful ergonomics especially if you aren’t as active as may need to be. Invest in an ergonomic keyboards, ergomice, vertical mice, trackpads. Variety is the best ergonomics. Minimize or stop using laptop keyboards. I use Logitech k860, Microsoft ErgoSculpt keyboard, kinesis freestyle widest separation at times, even though they are not mechanical. Slim keys are actually pretty good.
If you have a standing desk use it more often to change up the angles and use different muscles.
Strengthening:
- A gyroball works well. Builds up the core muscles.
https://www.amazon.com/NSD-Essential-Strengthener-Exerciser-...
- Wrist curls, not too much weight, get advice. Don’t overdo it.
- Finger strengthening using hand grips
- If you can find some hand massage or scraping tools and learn how tonier them they can alleviate a lot of stiffness in hands and forearms.
If you already have an injury, you want to build up supporting muscles first so you don't end up making it worse, and start slow.
> Strongly recommend.
It fixes most modern afflictions of sedentary < 60 years old people, very very strongly recommended indeed
Under physical therapy supervision, my >60-year old mother is exercising fairly vigorously (for her age) and has been seeing great improvements in her overall health and strength, so don't let age be a factor and get professional help if needed.
Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.
I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.
I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.
I changed many habits and it's been gone since then ... It's obviously different for everyone but I found that using a trackball helped a lot. For awhile I had a mouse on the left and trackball on the right, switching back and forth. But I don't need that anymore.
Taking breaks and minding posture is important. Wrist posture in particular -- I don't rest my wrists or arms on anything -- only my fingers make contact with the keyboard.
Much later, I started weight training with kettle bells, and I noticed a pretty nice improvement in strength / circulation.
That's one of the biggest takeaways I had from playing bass guitar in high school, actually. If you can delegate the movement to a bigger muscle group, it's generally a good idea do so. Shoulder/back instead of arm, arm instead of hand, hand instead of finger...
This. I had problems with back pain, neck pain and RSI about 10 years ago. I learned to sit up straight, corrected my desk height and rearranged stuff on my desk so I'm not typing like a shrimp. I also realized I really don't need to type as much as I did.
No pain ever since.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." and also this one:
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Make sure you qoute the guidelines at me. Tattletales have to just have to people please. Lol.
In case it helps at all, I promise you that these comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: apparently so!
At times I've even seen better collaboration between random open source maintainers working together than some of the companies where everyone was in an open office floorplan.
If you like working in an open office, that's great for you. I don't.
I guess my South African English accent isn't helping.
And Caps Lock's young new cousin "Caps Word" is worth checking out. https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_caps_word
https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad/issues/228
I don't run into HRM even at over 100 wpm, on Dvorak. (I'd expect Dvorak to use home row more than qwerty), whereas one user in that thread said he needed to resort to a fork in order to use them.
I read that more as configuring tap-hold is difficult, and that perhaps some typing styles don't suit current implementations. -- I know that if I type "down a, down o, down e, up a, up o, up e" I get "aoe", and afaiu that's different than "must type staccato" that the issue raises.
The other part of no-delay without breaking your typing style should also be possible in the software, but don't know of a great solution there
Better to use home row mods, control prefix as a thumb key, or modal key sequencers instead is key combos
Replacing CapsLock with Ctrl works for many Emacs users who cannot create mods or carry around an external ergonomic keyboard with them everywhere they go. I know it does not work for all but it works for many.
What really is a bad design is to have precious keyboard real estate wasted by the CapsLock key. Anything that changes that is some improvement on it even if that is mapping CapsLock to Ctrl and using pinky sideways. We use the pinky sideways anyway with Shift, Enter, Tab, ... Adding one more key to sideways pinky does not make it a "bad design".
> Adding one more key to sideways pinky does not make it a "bad design".
Of course it does, and you mentioning other bad designs (by the way,you can also remap those) doesn't change this basic fact of keyboard ergonomics: it's bad because you're using very inconvenient key for very frequent operations
What are those alternatives? Why talk in riddles when you can simply share those alternatives?
I'm looking at a mac user's keyboard settings right now and the only built in options I can find for Ctrl are Caps Lock, Option, Command, Function. If they want to have a better Ctrl experience which of these other alternatives should I suggest them? Install a new tool only to manage key bindings? I've already lost their attention!
> it's bad because you're using very inconvenient key for very frequent operations
Says who? I don't turn my CapsLock to Ctrl but every longtime CapsLock-as-Ctrl user I know swear by them. They say in person and online that CapsLock to Ctrl helped them get over RSI.
How do you decide for them that it's bad for them? You could say that CapsLock to Ctrl is bad for you. I just don't understand how you could proclaim that it is bad for me and others.
I have, you only had to read a short 2nd sentence of the original comment, they're listed after the comma separator
> Says who?
Who do you need to state this obvious and well publicised fact that lateral/pinky motions are unergonomic??? Though it does explain your later misunderstandings and confusing relative and absolute again
I read that and found it to be not relevant to non-tech-savvy users. Well the problem is how do you really make them alter their keyboard so that control prefix is now a thumb key without sacrificing something else?
Like in the settings I pulled up in the other comment, I could ask them to make their Command or Option as Ctrl. But after doing that, they lose some other key (command or option) from the thumb key which is important too. Both command and option are important and frequent enough to be thumb keys. There is no clear winner about which key should go here.
> or modal key sequencers instead is key combos
Like which ones exactly? Can you name some names? Do you mean like Evil or god-mode? There's a lot of choices there and I know users who use one or the other. But many don't like to change the modeless editing to modal editing such packages invariable force upon you.
Much better is to just enable sticky keys which all major OS seem to be support. But again not everyone likes them. Who am I to tell them otherwise if they have tried both and prefer CapsLock as Control more than sticky keys?
***
Like I said earlier the real travesty is the wastage of real estate with the CapsLock key. The stock keyboards come with this travesty. I see anything that changes that as improvement even if it is making CapsLock to be Ctrl and using pinky sideways.
Making CapsLock as Ctrl is the least invasive choice for them. I'm not surprised that most people do this. I'm genuinely surprised that you would go as far as proclaiming this to be universally bad.
> Who do you need to state this obvious and well publicised fact that lateral/pinky motions are unergonomic?
Again, says who? I mean why is your word more important than those who swear by lateral pinky? Care to link to some research that establishes this as a "fact"?
If you don't want to buy into the whole Vi and modal editing thing there are plethora of packages to have better key bindings. To name a few: god-mode, devil-mode, meow, hydra, general, spacemacs. Pick any from this and you don't have to worry about key chording anymore.
Notwithstanding the last few decades of trend, many people still want certain data/behavior to stay firmly within a device they (supposedly) own and control, as opposed to owning a dumb-terminal.
Just for example I need to check for environment in js if it's prod, it did some statement like (environment === 'prod' || environment === 'prod-blue etc etc. I stripped it all down to just environment.includes('prod') lol.
Another is just say if you're dealing with an api that returns a string for 'true' instead of true. It wrote a huge function about this...
Cursor is pretty smart about what to prompt GPT with. In the case that you described, you might prompt it with something like "check for prod" and I expect it would work. The reason it would have a better success rate is that it's usually quite good about what context to send over - it would likely pick up the type definitions (if you have those) or other files that do similar things and send those over as well.
To give a full answer to your question, I actually wouldn't prompt it with "check for prod" at all because that would be underutilizing GPT. I would probably prompt at the complexity level of something like "edit this component so that if we're in prod, we show a warning message at the top". I would expect GPT to do that accurately for a component up to 100-200 lines virtually every time.
I can see a lot of promise in this. Particularly if this integrates a sort of "record and perform" feature. Say I'm doing action X with my keyboard, and I know I need to do Y after, and 1) I can see all the required text on the screen, 2) it's a simple operation. I could then speak the command for Y while executing X, and then press the button to execute the voice command after I finish X. Much better than having to alternate between typing and speaking.
Alternately typing and speaking would lead to using different parts of our cognition, and writing software isn't very verbal once you've grokked the syntax. Instead, if one can type and speak at the same time, it'll work everything and make achieving a flow state much easier. Sort of like rubber ducking on steroids.
One could take notes, too...
I see an Emacs package coming lol.
[0] https://youtu.be/GM_siEPD4Ws?si=f52wK3tqqJaCQPp7
There is one that drives vscode or jetbrains with cursorless plugin, but a native emacs one would be nice.
Emacs is pretty good in the other direction (can type, can't see) thanks to Emacspeak.
But it's going to be a while before Emacs can catch up in this domain. The display engine can't handle cursorless-style notation, and the tree-sitter integration is not mature yet.
Source: I've tried.
Because they talk over noisy, distorted channels that have about 3 kHz bandwidth, in environments that are noisy to begin with?
You can talk to your PC in 16 bit (or more) audio sampled at 48 kHz, with a decent microphone, in a relatively quiet environment. Moreover, it could be tailored to understand your voice specifically, not just anyone saying "U".
In either case, you're using the same number of syllables, so there isn't any speed lost. You just have to spend a day learning the alphabet.
In 2023, if whatever you're using doesn't listen for stops, here is a dime, get yourself a better speech recognizer?
I'm not learning any phonetic alphabet other than the ICAO standard one.
If I ever have to use that one, I will look like a fool if that nonstandard one starts slipping in by mistake.
[0] https://youtu.be/GM_siEPD4Ws?si=99ZhC1P4irOyu1pH
If you do 6-8 hours voice coding like I have in the past, you'll appreciate every micro optimization.
Some detail about it here:
https://whalequench.club/blog/2019/09/03/learning-to-speak-c...
> With one exception, all the NATO words have more than one syllable (e.g., November has three) and are not efficient for commands like the alphabet that you will use frequently
Why not jam, jaw, jail, junk, join, jerk, jest, jazz, jade, etc.
- Get a TKL keyboard, those extra 5 inches to stretch to your mouse are important
- Or try using your mouse IN FRONT of your keyboard, like, I usually have mine turned 90' counter-clockwise and resting somewhere under my left "Alt" key. If you never used it that way it may feel weird for like 5 minutes. Then it's natural for eternity
- And get a mechanical keyboard ("red" switches should be okay for most people)
You're gonna have to walk me through that one.
> And get a mechanical keyboard
I'm not convinced that mechanical keyboards help with reducing RSI, since they usually require more actuation force and key travel. I've found slim keyboards with low key travel, whether mechanical or membrane, to be the most comfortable to type on for extended periods of time.
A mouse is a proxy for the pointer, you move the mouse and that moves the pointer a scaled amount, precisely, distance-for-distance predictable movement. A trackpoint is a joystick, you lean it in a direction and the pointer goes in that direction and you have to work with the timing and guess when to let go for the pointer to stop in the place you want. It's like controlling a pointer by poking it with a bouncy spring, there could hardly be a worse mismatch.
The opposite version of the mismatch is trying to control a driving game with a mouse, where the car only steers left as long as the mouse is actively moving left, so you have to continually swipe the mouse and pick it up and reswipe over and over to go round a corner.
Joysticks are not a good fit to control a mouse pointer.
Have you ever used a Trackpoint? It's more than a joystick. It's pressure sensitive, which means that you can quickly cross large distances, or be precise across smaller ones, by adjusting the exerted pressure. There's no guessing where the pointer will stop, since there's no deceleration, and you're almost[1] always in full control.
I agree that it's less precise than a mouse, but not by much once you're used to it. I'd trade the comfort of always keeping my hands on the keyboard for a slight decrease in precision any day. And this is even less of a problem if you optimize your workflow to use keyboard-driven UIs as much as possible.
[1]: The only issue I have with it is that it ocasionally gets "stuck" in one direction, which fixes itself after a second of letting go of it. It's possibly related to dirt or dust, because of its high sensitivity, but I haven't found that cleaning helps much. Though this might be only an issue on ThinkPad laptops, which Lenovo hasn't cared to fix for many years now.
You know when moving a mouse to resize a column in some data view, only the developers made it so the hit target is a single pixel and it's excruciating to try and hit it? A trackpoint is like that all the time, for every use case.