I developed RSI symptom’s at the tail of writing my MPhil dissertation and started looking for ways to work more ergonomically. As someone who’s often typing in one form or anther 8+ hours a day one obvious aspect to look at was my keyboard. I’m using the ZSA Moonlander as my daily driver which I purchased with my PhD stipend machine budget. It’s an ergonomic ortholinear split mechanical keyboard.
The ortholinear layout has allowed me to learn how to touch type (I could just never get the hang of it on a normal keyboard). Using keyboard-centric editors like Vim and Emacs, as well as Firefox Tridactyl, has helped my reduce mouse usage which had also proved aggravating.
I was briefly looking at 3D-printing a custom keyboard, like the Dactyl-ManuForm, but decided an off-the-shelf solution would give me most of the same benefit for a lot less work. Another input method that looks interesting is the modern incarnation of the 90s DataHand, the Svalboard. This is a bit of a rabbit hole though, and I’ve got a setup I’m pretty happy with the moonlander.
The Moonlander uses the open-source QMK Firmware, and you can find my configuration here.