captsolo weblog

Recently I am experiencing RSI (repetitive strain injury) related pain in the left hand. I must find some way to fight it and would appreciate your comments.

MacBook Pro is what I am using these days. This both sets the environment in which I am trying to help RSI-related symptoms and is also partially a reason why RSI has become more intense.

Contrary to many other reports I am not experiencing problems with the mouse-holding right hand. Perhaps this is because I am a keyboard user and avoided using mouse for file navigation tasks on Windows thanks to the FAR Manager (an advanced file manager similar to Norton Commander).

What I found out after moving to a Mac is that the left hand gets more stress because of keystroke combos like Cmd-W, Cmd-’, Fn-Bspace, Fn-Shift-Up, etc. These require hand to be moved out of the normal typing position and moving fingers into multi-key combos which make the hand hurt more. Maybe it is also something in ergonomics of the keyboard or something else is different between the way I work with this notebook and the previous one (IBM ThinkPad R40).

Anyhow, need to find some way to fix this. There is software that makes you take regular breaks, which helps with typing tasks. But even more important in this situation would be to offload the left hand from frequent shortcut combos (but unfortunately the left part of the keyboard is where the only set of Fn, Ctrl, Opt keys is located). How would you solve this? What other things might help?