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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

He's still not using an ergonomic keyboard. Typical keyboards require the user to press the key to the bottom to activate it, like pushing your finger into the desk. A mechanical keyboard switch activates halfway from the bottom, reducing the extra stress on your fingers.

Here's a collection of other RSI stories, along with other ergonomic information:

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

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Fwiw, I was disabled for 8 years with RSI, and the best keyboard I've found, for me, is the Apple one displayed in this article. It has the lightest touch of any keyboard I've used except for actual touchpad style ergonomic keyboards, which can be worse, since they can be difficult to use and require static pressure - like the keyboard of the screen of a tablet. Not to mention being unobtainable.

There are a lot of switches. Reddit has a great guide:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/switch_gui...

There's a table with activation forces:

    MX Red		Linear		45cN
    MX Black		Linear		60cN
    MX Dark Grey		Linear		80cN
    MX Brown

I have a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, and it's awesome. I can use a million emacs key chords all day and it's painless for my pinkies.

The Kinesis Advantage has really helped me, along with a Kensington Expert Mouse (which is actually a trackball). I used to get pains all the way up my right arm and through both wrists, but now worst case is a slightly tired hand.

The Kinesis Advantage has MX Cherry Brown switches. It would be great to understand what makes this keyboard effective. How does an Ergodox compare, for instance? I've also got a Github page dedicated to ergonomic keyboards:

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/keyboa...

The lf version comes with red mx switches. It's not just the keys though, as the position of the keys helps immensely.

> Typical keyboards require the user to press the key to the bottom to activate it

For all I don't like about Apple, their aluminum keyboards are what I prefer and use, precisely for the reasons stated in the article, and to counter your claim, the Apple aluminum keyboard travel is very short, so it bottoms out much quicker and still gives a feel like a mechanical keyboard.

My claim was that you don't want to hit the bottom. If the bottom is "very short", isn't that worse? I don't know the numbers for Apple's keyboards? You activate after about 2mm on a typical mechanical keyboard. You hit bottom around 4mm, which of course, you don't want to do.

I use an ergodox infinity, the main things I like about it are the columnar layout (q->a->z are in a straight line), and I can use it at varying widths and angles. I mostly use it at about shoulder width, angled slightly outwards. I still use QWERTY but it's not been a problem.

Oh, he has my key feature for an ergonomic keyboard (and he forgot to mention it). It doesn't have a keypad. This alone helps lots of shoulder issues by reducing horizontal travel switching to the mouse.

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