Re: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks?

This may be a little off the topic of the Perlmonks markup, but Carpal Tunnel is not to be taken lightly.

Seven years ago a coworker showed me his wrists after surgery. It looked just as though he had been nailed to the cross. I decided to take the Dvorak plunge and haven't looked back. YMMV, of course.

You might want to look at Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard and think about it. Any decently recent Linux distro or any version of Windows since 2000 will already have the keyboard mapping. I can recommend (ABCD) as a good set of starting exercises.

Best of luck.

Comment on Re: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks?

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Re^2: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks? by monarch (Priest) on Oct 15, 2006 at 02:41 UTC
YMMV, of course. I agree that Carpal Tunnel is not to be taken lightly. I also agree that mileage varies with the individual. I've seen a guy out of university trying every technique to look after his sensitive wrists, including standing with a neck strap attached to his keyboard (much like a guitar). As for me, like I said, I make sure I hit each keystroke with a reasonable amount of force. I've only met one person who types at the same rate as me with the same high accuracy. And I've been doing it for about 12 years seriously. My wrists are fine. Actually the most screwed up my wrists ever got was in high school doing final exams with a pen and pad. All I'm saying is look into whatever technique you find suits you best. Dvorak is a solution. But either way you're going to be doing a lot of keystrokes in your career - and trying to absolutely minimise the amount of typing you'll have to do (e.g. saving 5-10%) isn't necessarily the best answer.	[reply]
Re^2: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks? by kaif (Friar) on Oct 15, 2006 at 04:38 UTC
... but Carpal Tunnel is not to be taken lightly Jamie Zawinski's experience with typing injury is a great read on what can go wrong and some things one can do to combat the problem. If you don't mind my asking, quester (and any other Dvorak users), I have a question unrelated to typing injuries: do you actually think you type faster (not "in a healthier manner") using a Dvorak layout than you did when you (presumably) used a QWERTY layout? I ask because there's a lot of both pro- and anti-Dvorak propoganada and I can't make up my mind. (Also, when coding, did you re-learn new positions for the non-alphanumeric characters, such as braces, or use the "usual" ones?)	[reply]
Re^3: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks? by quester (Vicar) on Oct 15, 2006 at 05:14 UTC
Hmm... actually I never measured my typing speed before and after. I think it's roughly the same for me, but then I never typed very fast anyway. I would guess that that's true of most people who type more code than text. As far as I can see, trying to use the existing positions for nonalphanumerics is going to get awfully involved, because the Qwerty keys assigned to some of those characters, ",<.>/?;:" in particular, are used for letters in Dvorak, "wWvVzZsS". If you try to avoid moving the "[" key you will need to move "/' elsewhere...	[reply]
Re^4: Some sites cause Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. Surely not PerlMonks? by ammon (Sexton) on Oct 16, 2006 at 18:02 UTC
Agreed. The claims to improve your typing speed seem to be rubbish. I might have seen a slight increase, but I have my doubts. Some things are faster, some things are slower. I made the switch due to boredom, not RSI. I did have a small amount of wrist pain every now and then, which hasn't gone away. I'm sure it's due to crummy typing posture more than the actual typing.	[reply]