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Comment by cjh_ | Hacker News Reader

Similar story for me, I'm 21 and due to bad computer and mousing habits I have quite nasty RSI/OOS in my wrists.

Switching to an ergonomic mechanical keyboard (kinesis advantage) and a keyboard-heavy workflow (vim) allows me to work as a developer.

I can tell how often I resort to using the mouse each day by the pain when I get home (I have a trackball on my left hand side and a touchpad on my right hand side to try alleviate this), thanks to not using the mouse all day I can often game for a few hours without too much trouble.

This isn't necessary specific to vim, however vim's modality and extremely expressive command language really minimize the amount of movement I need to do for any given action, no more emacs-pinky for me.

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My current development machine is running Linux with Xmonad (Vim keybinds). I run console Vim inside Tmux (vim keybinds). I run Vimium in Chrome. I have also remapped the caps lock key to CTRL in every OS I use (all of them) to avoid reaching for the CTRL key. I've also retrained myself to use C^[ for ESC rather than remapping "," or something else. C^[ works in a lot of places too, so that is a nice bonus. I can usually code for hours without using the mouse at all unless I'm using Chrome's dev tools.

Before switching to Vim a few years ago I got a Comfort Keyboard to see if that would help. But after switching to Vim I find that I don't need anything other than a normal keyboard so far. I hope that doesn't change for the foreseeable future.

I hope you continue to find ways to improve your situation. It seems like things just keep getting better for those of us who need to avoid the mouse as much as possible.

Thank you for that insight, glad to hear that you are able to comfortably use a computer :)

As much as I wish you weren't in pain, it is a little comforting to know that there are others in a similar situation.

The main advantage of the kinesis for me is all the buttons around the thumbs and the fact it supports remapping from the device itself, so that whenever I am feeling pain I move keys around to alleviate it (often moving keys away from pinkies and towards the thumbs if I find myself using them often).

I have a windows,alt,ctrl and tab key under each thumb. Shift and backspace under the left, right and space under the right.

On my laptop I have capslock as esc but this doesn't help too much as my pinkies are quite painful to use after a while.

I use dwm, set -o vi for most of my terminals, and pentadactyl in firefox.

Haven't heard of Vimium; I have been looking for a Chrome equivalent as I prefer it as a browser, pentadactyl is nice but it has the issue that it currently doesn't support the use of ctrl-c which drives me insane.

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