From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Jul 18 07:53:46 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id HAA24339 for chat-outgoing; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 07:53:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.34]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA24330 for ; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 07:53:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA02624; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 09:53:39 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu: jfieber owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 09:53:39 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber X-Sender: jfieber@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu To: Greg Lehey cc: FreeBSD Chat Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard In-Reply-To: <199607180826.KAA25055@allegro.lemis.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 18 Jul 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: > > It takes more than a day to settle into it. > > I could believe that :-( My real question is, why bother? If after a long day of typing, your hands, wrists and/or arms are sore in any way, you could be causing permanent dammage to yourself, even if the pain is quite subtle. After many years, you may completely loose your ability to type. I'm not making this up, it really happens to people. For me, switching from a regular keyboard to the MS keyboard was awkward for awhile, but not painful. Going back to a regular keyboard now is awkward, *and* painful. I doubt it is any more painful than using it was before, but now that I've typed on something else that doesn't hurt, I really notice it. Its the old notion of not noticing the air until there isn't any of it. Alternate analogy: bad habbits are hard to break, even if you know they are bad. Given the huge losses that companies swallow in RSI treatment and lost work time caused by poor keyboard design, I find it hard to believe that there are so *few* alternative keyboards on the market. The MS one is the first affordable one, but since people differ in their geometry, its fixed geometry is less than ideal. Also, people who like the noisy IBM key action won't like it that much. > > I guess you have a different geometry. :-) > > It's more like my chair. In fact, looking at the way I sit, I *do* > have my arms inclined at about 15°, Of course, you have to have them inclined because your shoulders are wider than where your hands have to be. Thats not the big problem with regular keyboards. The problem is you have to bend your wrists outward in a less than natural position to align your fingers on the home row of a regular keyboard: | | / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ regular microsoft For more information on typing injuries and alternate keyboards, look at: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dwallach/tifaq/ -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================