February 19th, 2008 ( Updated: February 20th, 2008 )
AOEUI
A recent increase in my textual output has resulted in a flare-up of old RSI troubles. In an attempt to reduce the wear and tear on my hands, I'm switching over to Dvorak (and taking an opportunity to train away bad old habits.)
This will mean that I am going to be blogging less for a while - at least until I get back to a reasonable speed.
(… and I have voice-recognition software on the way.)
Tags: Blogging, Dvorak, Miscellaneous, Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, RSIRelated posts
Posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 22:12
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February 19th, 2008 at 23:27
Sorry to hear about your RSI. I had an RSI a while ago and tried a variety of things to fix it, including switching to Dvorak but also taking up a martial art and adjusting my work environments.
In the end it went away, although it's hard to say what did it. The most valuable medical advice I received was not to give up doing other things with my wrists (f.e. bowling), since those activities not only strengthened my wrists but got me off the computer. IANAD, YMMV, etc.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:10
The biggest hurdle I had in switching to Dvorak was the keybindings like Ctrl+C or hjkl moving around. I learned to deal with it rather than remapping anything, but it is an annoying problem. It does feel a bit nicer, though.
February 20th, 2008 at 18:30
I switched in 2002. If you type my name in QWERTY on a Dvorak keyboard, you get Xaprb, hence my geeky online handle. It took me weeks to be able to type at all again, and it was incredibly frustrating — like the descriptions I've heard of Alzheimer's disease: I know I know where that key is, now where is it???? I did this in the middle of my thesis, too. But I never would have finished my thesis without it.
The other very helpful thing I did was remapping the caps-lock and ESC keys. This is especially good because I'm a Vim user.
Rock climbing has been a great help, too.
Today I can type fine on both QWERTY and Dvorak. I've never been a super-fast typist, but I get the job done.
I hope your RSI gets better soon. It took many months for my pinkie and thumb to stop spasming, even when I wasn't typing at all for weeks on end.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:22
Hi Zak,
hope you are doing better!
Sandro