Author of the article here, kinda surprised to see this doing so well here. But in case you're all interested, here's my repo of Talon stuff I'm experimenting with: https://github.com/Xe/invocations
I dunno. My wrists are mostly good, but my knuckles aren't always, thanks to the early-onset osteoarthritis that comes with the family hands. I expect there will come days when it would be, if not absolutely necessary, then at least a lot less painful to work this way than with a keyboard, so I'm glad to know there's a viable option.
I'm glad you wrote it up, and that it got to the front page here strikes me as HN working as intended.
This stuff is really worth of taking the effort to learn at least once.
I didn't actually write this up per se :P Technically, I dictated it and there's probably some gnarly typos with homophones in there that I haven't totally eliminated because it was a bit of a fire and forget piece, where I was just dumping my thoughts on a topic.
I mean technically you wouldn't have written it up even with a keyboard, so... :D
And yeah, even notwithstanding the massive accessibility benefit, I can see use in learning it just for the sake of a new lens on how to navigate code. Sort of the same reason I'm looking forward to the big Emacs 29 update on all my machines around the end of the year - among other things, I get to find out firsthand whether I'm as excited as I should be for first class tree-sitter, or not excited enough.
But for VS Code folks, this is already right there and I can't imagine not wanting to play around at least a bit with it and see what it can do.
Have you considered strength training? Strengthening your grip can lessen the pain of arthritis in the hands. Exercises like deadlifts and bent over barbell rows will give you a very strong grip. (People assume it's all about the big muscles but grip strength is actually one of the main limiting factors for deadlift progression!)
That seems to have helped me a lot. I developed chronic pain in my knuckles from typing. I've had it for about seven years.
I started strength training this year, for other reasons. Using a rowing machine irritated my fingers, so I thought I'd have to avoid things like deadlifts and pullups. But I started using heavy clubs, which really work the grip but with the force pulling in a different direction. I've at least doubled my grip strength with those, and my fingers are a lot better now in general. (Now I'm doing deadlifts and rows too.)
Other things that helped before this:
- Switching to mech keyboards, and training myself to type without bottoming out the keys. When the problem first developed it was so bad I worried my career was ending. Mech keyboards fixed that.
- Holding my hands in ice water for ten minutes each, once a day. First two minutes are super painful, then the rest isn't bad. After a while you get used to it and the first part is all right too. That was more for acute relief when it was getting bad, and it made a huge difference. I've seen at least one study saying it works, too.
If you struggle with deadlifts, a farmer walk with something heavy works wonders as well. I can wake up with my hands aching, get some walks in, and the pain is down to 25% or so. Inflammation feels reduced, hand moves more fluidly, and it doesn’t come back quickly unless it’s very damp and cold.
Farmer walks are amazing and I encourage people to do them more. Deadlifts are awesome for all kinds of reasons too; walks are definitely not a replacement, just a great alternative as far as hands go.
I have written about it here before, but I also suffer from pretty bad arthritis in my knuckles, I am only 37 and this has been the case for almost a decade.
After trying many things, the thing that helped me the most was switching to a super low pressure rubber dome keyboard and typing softly. I use a Sun Type 7 but really any keyboard with super low pressure keys would probably do.
Just want to say, I love your writing -- it's rare to find someone with such a distinctive voice. I've read a bunch of your articles and posts, keep going!
Thank you, I'm very glad that the transition to dictation hasn't made me lose a lot of the je ne sais quoi of my voice when writing. I have been using dictation to write my conference talks for a while; but, I have started doing it for my blog very recently. This may be one of those "curse of the artist" type things, but when I read my dictated articles, they just look very different than the ones that I have typed out. I'm not sure how, but they're just different.
I know for me I to see these kinds of setups (like every eMacs setup) and realize that my neuro divergence is very different than others
I freeze in awe at how much context and abstractions you have to keep in your head to just navigate and grok what’s happening. It’s like three layers of abstraction and having decades of fluency in a language and IDE/CLI.
“ After a while, they just become second nature like Vim commands do. I have been forcing myself to use this over and over again for the past few days and it's starting to become second nature.”
Ha yeah that does seem like what it would take to learn to use this.
I’ve been making computers go brrrr for 30 years and this level of coding fluency will never not confuse and impress me.
Fwiw the finger contortions needed by eMacs were also giving me RSIs - other than cutting my computer use (basically don’t spend every waking moment typing) I switched to vim since I figured its modal nature would require fewer multi-finger combos. I’ve been mostly free of issues for over 15 years now.
I make it a point to always press the modifier key with my other hand to reduce finger contortions. For pressing multiple modifiers, I take my hand off of home row to avoid using my pinky. (I also use a ortho-linear mechanical keyboard with thumb clusters and a Colemak-DH layout.)
Keyboards with thumb clusters are definitely the best option, but in my experience, even on a normal keyboard, simply remapping your keys makes a world of difference.
Here are some of my most useful remaps:
- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"
- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).
- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.
- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.
- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.
The "when not pressed with other keys" stuff is interesting. I never thought about that. The only trouble I can see with this is being unable to type effectively on a normie keyboard. I've had the ctrl/caps swap for years and I regular mess it up on a normie keyboard, although it's no big deal to accidentally press caps, of course. What I like is my portable mechanical keyboard has a physical switch, so it works whatever computer I plug it in to.
Even though, as I wrote above, Emacs does not require finger contortions, I do do finger contortions. I doubt I'll ever stop using Emacs but I have always been a little concerned about my little fingers ("pinkies"). So the options seem to be either evil mode, or a new keyboard, both of which require busting a decade's worth of muscle memory...
Afaik that's in-progress, and the goal is support for other editors, but it's not there yet. Vanilla talon (what cursorless is built on) works fine everywhere though! (You just don't get the AST transforms.)
Thank you for writing it. This whole post has made me really curious and I've taken the dive into Talon, already having written an app layer for Warp terminal and exposing my (normally not detected) terminal emacs to Talon.
I'm not too interested in Cursorless I don't use VSCode and vim/evil mode text objects are equally powerful (and less visually noisy). Very excited by this whole concept.
This is the shit. Thank you so much for sharing. I had remembered seeing Talon before, but I did not know you could do this with it. It did not click until today. I have been messing with it all day. Its so much fun. This is a lot closer to how I would expect all of those voice assistants to work. Its also really fun working with a computer like this.
I want to see a study teaching people to code using their voice versus with typing and then also by hand.
So this utilizes the tree-sitter AST and performs operations on the "parts" of the buffer? This, then, is very similar to textobjects in vim / evil, but with a spoken component.
I can see a lot of promise in this. Particularly if this integrates a sort of "record and perform" feature. Say I'm doing action X with my keyboard, and I know I need to do Y after, and 1) I can see all the required text on the screen, 2) it's a simple operation. I could then speak the command for Y while executing X, and then press the button to execute the voice command after I finish X. Much better than having to alternate between typing and speaking.
Alternately typing and speaking would lead to using different parts of our cognition, and writing software isn't very verbal once you've grokked the syntax. Instead, if one can type and speak at the same time, it'll work everything and make achieving a flow state much easier. Sort of like rubber ducking on steroids.
Emacs is pretty good in the other direction (can type, can't see) thanks to Emacspeak.
But it's going to be a while before Emacs can catch up in this domain. The display engine can't handle cursorless-style notation, and the tree-sitter integration is not mature yet.
Not cursorless specifically, but there is a great talk and demonstration about programming by voice here[0]. It's mesmerizing to watch. The speaker does a great job talking about the current commmon issues in the area too.
I remember that talk! They also have a channel with some more videos but unfortunately do not do coding by voice anymore: https://www.youtube.com/@mccGoNZooo
I am still trying to wrap my head around how this works. It sounds like it is similar to avy[1] but you use your voice instead of the keyboard? Coupled with some AST aware commands.
> Newcomers to voice coding often ask why not use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet
> With one exception, all the NATO words have more than one syllable (e.g., November has three) and are not efficient for commands like the alphabet that you will use frequently
Is eye-tracking tech not good enough these days to position a cursor when one stares at that position for 2+ seconds? I am recalling studies of driving or artwork where the gaze lingers.
XR devices with eye tracking have practically no latency instead you would need to tune down the points of interest hover over time triggers and then there are a lot of experimental keyboard ideas in Spatial Computing that could be integrated like starburst wheels could give you layers of type assist etc
This style of writing feels a lot like the sections of Gödel Escher Bach that had the tortoise and Achilles dialogues.
Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.
I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.
I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.
> I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.
That's one of the biggest takeaways I had from playing bass guitar in high school, actually. If you can delegate the movement to a bigger muscle group, it's generally a good idea do so. Shoulder/back instead of arm, arm instead of hand, hand instead of finger...
Similar things in martial arts. A strong punch comes from the hips and the shoulder. The elbow and wrist just come along for the ride and need to stabilize to survive.
Same here, I got a bout of severe RSI almost 15 years ago, for a few months
I changed many habits and it's been gone since then ... It's obviously different for everyone but I found that using a trackball helped a lot. For awhile I had a mouse on the left and trackball on the right, switching back and forth. But I don't need that anymore.
Taking breaks and minding posture is important. Wrist posture in particular -- I don't rest my wrists or arms on anything -- only my fingers make contact with the keyboard.
Much later, I started weight training with kettle bells, and I noticed a pretty nice improvement in strength / circulation.
The author intentionally does that, if you go to the character page you can see they’re supposed to reflect a Socrates and student dialogue. Pretty clever imo.
This. I had problems with back pain, neck pain and RSI about 10 years ago. I learned to sit up straight, corrected my desk height and rearranged stuff on my desk so I'm not typing like a shrimp. I also realized I really don't need to type as much as I did.
Can you please stop breaking the site guidelines like this? We've already had to warn you about this exact thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37358816, and we end up having to ban accounts that won't fix such issues.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." and also this one:
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
If you want a general overview of cursorless, along with seeing what it looks like in practice, the talk from Strange Loop this year was great: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY
I love this and I'm super glad it's being developed, but I think I'd have to break my arm or hand (or have severe RSI) to really dive in. The startup cost seems high, mentally speaking.
I agree, but so is the start up cost of so many other tools people use such as emacs/vim, dvorak/colemak, chorded keyboards, etc.
That being said, I think the biggest limiter is the fact that you can only really use this if you work from home alone, can't imagine using this anywhere outside or at the office.
Right now, I am grappling with RSI and I haven't been able to program for more than a few days in the past month. I am not even typing this, but using the Voice Access feature of Windows 11 in order to input this. I ordered an ergonomic keyboard (Glove80) and I am waiting for it. I also have an ergonomic mouse and even got an ergonomic chair. But I know that regardless of the case, I won't be able to program. for at least a few months. Until my hand recovers. If it does at all.
I am definitely going to check out this extension. Quick question: does it work on any language or just something like Javascript?
It works better in some languages rather than others. Python and JavaScript are the best supported. I have been working on making the situation better with go. But I demoed it with JavaScript because JavaScript is the most understandable to the largest part of my audience.
Realistically half of the way to program with voice is syntax. One of the really cool parts with the voice bindings is that the voice binding for making a function is the same in every language. I am honestly quite terrible with Python. However, when I know that the default command to make a function is funky, I can just step right in there and make it work.
You must crawl before you can walk. You must walk before you can run. You must run before you can fly. Welcome to the Crawling Phase.
The same reason pilots say "fower" instead of "four" and soldiers "foxtrot" instead of "eff" - a good spelling alphabet is much clearer and ambiguity-free than English letter names. Getting into speculation here, I expect the reason they use their own alphabet instead of something like the NATO phonetic alphabet is a matter of use case: unlike radio communications, transcription provides immediate, unambiguous feedback (the letters show up on your screen) and mistakes are low-impact and easily corrected, so a degree of clarity is sacrificed in exchange for improved speed.
Because they talk over noisy, distorted channels that have about 3 kHz bandwidth, in environments that are noisy to begin with?
You can talk to your PC in 16 bit (or more) audio sampled at 48 kHz, with a decent microphone, in a relatively quiet environment. Moreover, it could be tailored to understand your voice specifically, not just anyone saying "U".
When you're combining letter names with other commands, even in perfect recording conditions, there will be confusion. The command "back Q" sounds very very close to "back U", but "back quench" is different than "back urge".
In either case, you're using the same number of syllables, so there isn't any speed lost. You just have to spend a day learning the alphabet.
"back U", or perhaps more pertinently "black U", is not very close to "black Q". They are phonetically distinct. "black U" has no stop; in "black Q" there is a stop between the words. The final plosive of "black" is deleted so it becomes something similar to "bla ' kyu", whereas the other one is "blakyu".
In 2023, if whatever you're using doesn't listen for stops, here is a dime, get yourself a better speech recognizer?
I'm not learning any phonetic alphabet other than the ICAO standard one.
If I ever have to use that one, I will look like a fool if that nonstandard one starts slipping in by mistake.
what's wrong with just saying what you want to select in this example
select "function fetchBlog". If the recognition is slightly off for example "fetch Buhk" use some Levenstein to find the best match
Has anyone had any experience using this in a shared workspace? I think it would be awesome to learn, but I don't see it working well for me in an open plan working area.
I've actually seen this work quite well, in terms of voice recognition. The commands are specific enough and a lavalier / directed microphone can filter out most of the surrounding noise. Whether other people will be as happy with you speaking gibberish, that I can't say.
At some level, this is my insurance against ever working in an open office ever again. If an employer really does want me to work in an open office, I will just maliciously comply and get nothing done because the recognition just won't work.
Collaboration doesn't have to rely on everyone being in the same room or building.
At times I've even seen better collaboration between random open source maintainers working together than some of the companies where everyone was in an open office floorplan.
Surprisingly, everybody can have their own opinions about what they think is the best workspace for them. I find it difficult to focus in loud places. All of the open offices I've worked in have been loud places. I'm sure there are open offices that are not loud places, but luck of the draw, I have not seen that.
If you like working in an open office, that's great for you. I don't.
I'm not aware of any image loading issues, can you open the browser inspector and tell me what the fly-region header of the responses that are failing are?
Once I started climbing (indoor bouldering), all my RSI pain went away- I assume due to increased strength in my forearms and hands. It was mild enough to be managed by stretching during breaks, using split keyboards (that was more for shoulder pain), and wrist straps. But those were things they had to actively do to keep it at bay, whereas now I don’t think about it anymore since it doesn’t exist anymore.
- Get a TKL keyboard, those extra 5 inches to stretch to your mouse are important
- Or try using your mouse IN FRONT of your keyboard, like, I usually have mine turned 90' counter-clockwise and resting somewhere under my left "Alt" key. If you never used it that way it may feel weird for like 5 minutes. Then it's natural for eternity
- And get a mechanical keyboard ("red" switches should be okay for most people)
Have you considered using a Trackpoint instead of a mouse? To me it's the most comfortable way to move a pointer on the screen, and coupled with a keyboard-driven GUI, I rarely have to rely on it anyway. This seems like the most ergonomic setup to me, and I haven't experienced any hand discomfort after many years of using it.
> And get a mechanical keyboard
I'm not convinced that mechanical keyboards help with reducing RSI, since they usually require more actuation force and key travel. I've found slim keyboards with low key travel, whether mechanical or membrane, to be the most comfortable to type on for extended periods of time.
> "Have you considered using a Trackpoint instead of a mouse?"
A mouse is a proxy for the pointer, you move the mouse and that moves the pointer a scaled amount, precisely, distance-for-distance predictable movement. A trackpoint is a joystick, you lean it in a direction and the pointer goes in that direction and you have to work with the timing and guess when to let go for the pointer to stop in the place you want. It's like controlling a pointer by poking it with a bouncy spring, there could hardly be a worse mismatch.
The opposite version of the mismatch is trying to control a driving game with a mouse, where the car only steers left as long as the mouse is actively moving left, so you have to continually swipe the mouse and pick it up and reswipe over and over to go round a corner.
Joysticks are not a good fit to control a mouse pointer.
> A trackpoint is a joystick, you lean it in a direction and the pointer goes in that direction and you have to work with the timing and guess when to let go for the pointer to stop in the place you want.
Have you ever used a Trackpoint? It's more than a joystick. It's pressure sensitive, which means that you can quickly cross large distances, or be precise across smaller ones, by adjusting the exerted pressure. There's no guessing where the pointer will stop, since there's no deceleration, and you're almost[1] always in full control.
I agree that it's less precise than a mouse, but not by much once you're used to it. I'd trade the comfort of always keeping my hands on the keyboard for a slight decrease in precision any day. And this is even less of a problem if you optimize your workflow to use keyboard-driven UIs as much as possible.
[1]: The only issue I have with it is that it ocasionally gets "stuck" in one direction, which fixes itself after a second of letting go of it. It's possibly related to dirt or dust, because of its high sensitivity, but I haven't found that cleaning helps much. Though this might be only an issue on ThinkPad laptops, which Lenovo hasn't cared to fix for many years now.
Re [1], if the pressure is constant for about a second the software assumes that you aren't touching it and what remains is error in the hardware. It then compensates for the error by introducing a constant offset which exactly counteracts your motion. The only way to fix it is to let go until the software recalibrates to the actual error with zero pressure. Since learning this I've mostly avoided it without consciously changing my behaviour.
Joysticks are pressure sensitive, the speed of e.g. game aircraft roll is proportional to how far you lean the joystick. Yes I have used a trackpoint, that's why I dislike it so much.
You know when moving a mouse to resize a column in some data view, only the developers made it so the hit target is a single pixel and it's excruciating to try and hit it? A trackpoint is like that all the time, for every use case.
It's exactly what i've been doing for the last 12 years. IBM Spacesaver keyboards + vim keybindings everywhere possible, and during the year, stretching forearms everyday.
I've built a couple ergonomic solutions for my RSI issues including a supine workstation and hacking chair. Wrist torsion is what did the most damage. Split vertical keyboards to the rescue. https://jck.earth/2023/11/05/diy-hacking-chair.html
philosophical question: is Cursorless possible because of some difference between speech and typing, or would it be possible to make a vim-mode-but-more-powerful that can do the tree-sitter stuff
As it’s not been mentioned, I’ll say that you should pay very close attention to your desk height.
I had no idea that mine was too high. And then I sat at a colleague’s desk and it was low. Like lowrider-car low. Crazy low. And wow did it feel comfortable.
So then I fixed my own desk. Not to be crazy low, to be the right height. Because if it’s too high, you’re hunched all day. Your shoulders are up, you’re tense.
I also changed my chair. I had a classic office chair, but again too high (I’m average height, not a millimetre more), and with wheels. The wheels were killing me — all day your legs are trying to keep you stable, which sounds like cool exercise but isn’t. Turns out just being stable is better.
So I bought a chair. A wooden chair with four legs. About AU$80 from IKEA.
These two things alone transformed my RSI. I know, because I didn’t change my keyboard (Microsoft Ergo Sculpt) or my mouse (Logi MX Anywhere 3? whatever, just a mouse), or anything else. I didn’t exercise.
I fixed my desk height and my chair and my crippling RSI went away.
Some of the key realizations that led to healthier working posture for me have been:
1. Remembering what I learned from piano lessons at music school: keyboard should be approximately under your fingers if you relax your arms and bend your elbows 90 degrees. Where playing, you you have to engage your arms, not only fingers.
2. Putting screen at approximately eye level, give or take.
Yes, the above means a laptop is by default unsuitable for serious work. An external keyboard and/or display is a must.
3. Realizing that what we (at least in my generation) were taught at school about “orderly” position at a desk is a pile of something between wrongness and abuse. Relaxed, laid-back sitting position is best for you, and any boss or instructor who tries to tell you otherwise is engaging in status games.
A piano keyboard is flat and in front of you, all you can adjust is the height. But computer keyboards can be adjusted more - why bend the elbows 90 degrees, if you didn't have to, would that be the ideal thing to do?
I wouldn’t say it’s about forcing yourself to bend the elbows at 90 degrees rather than being in a position in which your elbows are naturally relaxed at approximately 90 degrees, give or take. It’s definitely worse if the angle is sharper, but I haven’t been comfortable with my arms straightened much further beyond that either. I suspect gravity’s impact on blood flow, perhaps it’s individual.
Split keyboards are definitely a rabbit hole one might want to explore, but it’s just logistically difficult to find a good unit that Just Works(tm), is configured or easily configurable as one would expect, doesn’t incur extra latency, is compact enough if you want to work from somewhere else, has key caps you want, is in stock, etc. Meanwhile, external mechanical wireless keyboards with good Cherry switches are available from the usual retailers these days and they take you 90% of the way if you’re currently working with a laptop as is (where your screen cannot be anywhere other than at the level of your hands and vice-versa). Thus, to me the returns of split keyboards are diminishing—to anyone who has wrist or other working posture-related issues and works on a laptop without a dedicated keyboard, I’d say fix that ASAP before starting to geek out on splits.
PS. To be honest, based on my experience, on some of those photos people’s positions look very uncomfortable for every other reason besides the split.
Nice. Don’t have to have RSI to appreciate this. I think I prefer this to learning vim shortcuts. I would rather say U than Urge so I don’t need to think but the phonetic alphabet would do I guess.
Does anyone have experience with throat microphone used for voice commands? It looks like good alternative when you want to use voice commands in public space.
A good friend of mine had carpal tunnel surgery in both hands (the doctor checked the other one just in case and went "eh, might as well do that one too") and one thing he was told to watch out for is to not have the wrists lay parallel to the desk for too long - so basically the default keyboard position.
The reason is that in this position the bones in the arms are in a twist and that puts pressure on the tissues - most notably the nerves.
Interestingly holding a gamepad or a phone in both hands is much closer to the ideal position.
Personally I avoided most problems due to the fact that I've been playing the guitar since I was a teenager and this community is particularly interested in wrist and arm health, so I learned to watch out for early signs of strain and how to not overdo it early on.
Ideally, you want your hands to hover while typing, not resting on your wrists.
I had surgery done in one hand a year ago. It has restored my ability to do most things (like cycling or using a gamepad), but regular keyboard and mouse use is still a problem.
For me, the biggest impact has been switching to a vertical mouse. That, along with a tented split keyboard allows me to work most days without aggravating my CTS.
> I know I'm a bit of an emacs user, but for this I've been using visual studio code because of one extension in particular: Cursorless.
Honestly want to know how many people here use Emacs like this? I thought Emacs users live their lives in Emacs. I know people who move more and more of their workflows into Emacs with packages like vterm, EAT, lsp-mode, pdf-tools, etc.
Are there seriously Emacs users who only a "bit of an emacs user". What is your workflow like? How do you decide when to use Emacs and when to use other tools? VSCode and Emacs have a lot of overlap in their purpose. How does this switching in and out of tools that overlap in their purpose feel?
I use emacs like that. When first getting into it, 20 years ago, I was very much as described above - slowly pulling everything in my life into emacs. And then the iPhone arrived, and I started pulling out things that I wanted to do mobile: email, to do lists, and eventually notes, and recipes. Most recently, I’ve started doing JavaScript in VS code, as the LLM assistants are better than what I’ve got in emacs, but I suspect this is temporary.
I find the emacs works best when it does everything, but there’s stuff it just doesn’t do, so I do that stuff elsewhere. I look outside of emacs if I think the task is going to be done mobile, and even then, I generally choose a solution that produces plain text so I can do it inside emacs if required - but sometimes that just doesn’t work out.
I suspect a lot of this is selection bias: the Emacs discussion you see online is often coming from fanatics rather than people who use Emacs without blogging about it.
Exactly and that's why I want to know more from those who don't do everything in Emacs and how they decide when to use Emacs and when to use another editor and how mixing both editors in your life works out for you.
I use Emacs for editing computer programs (and version control, some documentation, etc), as a calculator, and for interacting with R via orgmode. I don’t use it for reading email, editing other documents (gdocs, wiki, jira, etc), browsing the web, or even interacting with shells (I might call sort from Emacs but I don’t use shell-mode or similar.
I turned 30 this year and had a bout with RSI. My elbows hurt, there was pain in the back of my hand, and my little finger even started going numb if I use the phone too much. What helped:
- I got the logitech MX vertical mouse. This removed the pain in the back of my hand
- After being skeptical for a while, I got myself the logitech k860 ergonomic keyboard. It helped.
This is of course not a long term solution, but it might help you relieve pain almost immediately. Thought I'd leave this here in case someone was one the fence about buying an ergonomic mouse/keyboard.
Apparently it can be configured with shapes instead.
By the way, have you seen the Firefox extension "Let's Get Color Blind"? It can simulate colorblindness, but perhaps more importantly, it can Daltonize web pages on the fly to make them usable by the colorblind -- even including real-time stuff like video. It blew a protanopic coworker's mind. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/let-s-get-col...
This might be related to hand travel distance, in this case using a keyboard without numpad block or putting the mouse below the keyboard can have the same effect.
This has just been my experience with RSI (now recovered), so please take it with a grain of salt.
I used to have debilitating RSI when typing. I tried everything and it just got worse over time. Stretches. Typing a certain way. Taking breaks etc. My wrist would become locked after 10 minutes of typing and stay that way for the rest of the day.
I then read a book claiming that all pain is just based on expectation, so if you think it'll be painful it'll be painful, and get worse overtime as the expectation reinforces.
Quite literally within the space of 5 minutes, it all went away. All gone. That was around 8 years ago and I've not had it since. Doesn't matter how long I type, in what position etc. Doesn't affect me at all.
As per Acceptance and Commitment therapy (not the book, something I discovered much later) this can be defined as "the solution is the problem". When you focus on the solution, it defines itself as the problem and it simply becomes worse (think for example, someone who's overweight so eats to make themselves feel better, thereby becoming more overweight and the cycle repeating itself etc.)
Interestingly, the only time my wrist gets sore is when I get really stressed. So I think there's some merit to it being a response from the brain.
I think a large part of it has to do with the eastern idea of letting go. The basic idea is that suffering is a result of holding on too tightly, as opposed to observing intently. Once you observe, the suffering goes away.
I fought RSI for several years, where wrist pain got so bad that I was afraid I would have to stop using keyboards altogether. Went to doctors, did lots of tests, even got various treatments.
I eventually found out that the problems were psychosomatic. The key observation was that when I started reading John Sarno's "The Mindbody Prescription", my symptoms suddenly started shifting from wrists to ankles. "Hey wait a minute…" was my thought — and it turned out that my mind was the cause. I don't buy all of Sarno's stuff, but even thinking about this and considering it carefully caused major effects for me.
Fast forward many years, and taking care of my mind helped my overall health tremendously. Many problems I had are simply gone. And I have a finely tuned radar now whenever something new appears — if it isn't easily diagnosable and attributable to a medical problem, it's likely psychosomatic.
For those unaware: psychosomatic issues are not "hallucinated" nor are they hypochondria. These are real issues, just caused by your mind, for example causing muscle tension or restricted blood flow.
Looking around me, I can see many people whose issues are likely psychosomatic. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to help them, because "no one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself" — you have to be ready to accept this explanation and deal with the mental problems.
Obviously not all RSI problems are psychosomatic, but at least some are, so it's worth looking at.
I had intermittent, debilitating back issues for years after a grappling injury in my 20s - spasms that would come in an instant or appear overnight and take me off my feet for weeks. Brutal. Multiple people recommended Sarno’s “Healing Back Pain’, and I resisted it as woo for years until yet another recommendation got the best of me. I needed to read only the first chapter to recognize that while some of Sarno’s conjecture about the actual mechanism of action may be wrong, his thesis about much (not all) back pain applied perfectly to my situation, and since then - years ago now - I’m effectively cured of my issue.
Passed the book to my dad, who had similar issues, and he’s had only a few such incidents in the intervening years - a huge improvement.
Sarno’s book saved one of my friends’ life. Her pain was so debilitating she was suicidal, but the book unlocked her ability to work through the mental connection to her pain and start to heal it.
Funnily enough, I'm facing an issue at the moment, which I assume is related, but I haven't quite figured out how to resolve.
Basically my body gets really hot when I try to fall asleep and it really sucks, but I get the sense it's related. Like I can't let it go, so it becomes this whole thing, except I'm not quite sure how to approach it in this context.
You probably already know this because it's absolutely the top cause of what you describe, but eating raises your core body temperature, and people who eat within an hour or so of going to bed frequently experience this symptom.
I think if he multitasks during said hot shower he might have an easy solution to try tonight. Also keep the thermostat/ambient temp like way down at night. If its freezing around him the body heat is actually an adaptive thing potentially
1. Have you tried a weighted blanket? I bought one this summer as I don't have a/c but find it hard to fall asleep without the feeling of a big blanket covering me. I found this one[0] from Bearaby which is wonderful. It's weaved together so doesn't provide much/any warmth. Just a lot of soothing weight.
I have similar issues with sleeping hot. I bought a similar open-knit weighted blanket from yaasa this year and really like it.
Having a small fan blowing air over me also helps quite a bit (the Vornado 5303DC has a remote and can adjust in 1% increments which is very nice for adjusting temp a bit during the night).
He should fiddle with the thermostat first (low low low) but I agree with the fan thing, although its more of a white noise thing to me as opposed to the sensation of wind blowing (over) you
Sorry, is this an insomnia discussion or like a "I'm hot before bed" independant of how the sleep goes kinda deal?
I would advise against cold showers/baths/immersion as the will shock you into wakefullness and vigilance. Can't see how there's any evidence for that actually working. Its like saying "Ya, I turned my phone as bright and blue as it goes up to and I STILL couldn't sleep" :/
As a counterpoint, some years ago I developed a severe case of elbow pain (classic golfer's elbow, not that I play golf) in my right elbow. I stopped bouldering, got a vertical mouse, started carrying my kid only on the left arm. Nothing helped.
Then I did a little research and found a YouTube video that recommended muscle exercise instead of rest, using torsion bars. I bought those and did the exercises for a few weeks. Pain went away and hasn't returned.
Sarno doesn’t claim that soft tissue injuries are never real. Stuff like golfers/tennis elbow usually manifests with a clear overuse cause from strain in exercise. But this sort of thing where people experience debilitating pain from… typing, or their back seizes up when they pick up a bag of groceries. A lot of those cases can have a big psychosomatic component. There were two things in particular that I found interesting and that made my back pain shift around and leave when I read his book (paraphrases):
Chronic pain is culturally dependent, some countries have a lot of RSI, some don’t. Chronic neck pain from whiplash is a bigger deal in some places or in some decades than others.
If you give an X-ray to some one with chronic back pain a certain percentage of them will show bulging disks. If you give X-rays to a random group of people of the same demographics a similar percentage of them will show bulging disks, with no correlation to back pain.
The Tyler method you used for golfers elbow is a different example of a a rethink in treating other types of pain. It does have a plausible mechanism that runs counter to the traditional treatment, and it probably works as explained, encouraging healing and tissue remodelling through increased exercise-induced inflammation from eccentric reps. But… it’s also plausible that the quality of the paper describing it and the thrill of counter-knowledge helps make it work even better.
Both the right exercise and not obsessing about a change or pain in your body is a good way to get rid of join pains, trapped nerves, stiff muscles, etc.
Obviously people should watch out for the signs of common chronic diseases, but in my experience I get far more aches and pains when being less active. Going to the gym once or twice a week and doing some compound exercises will help vastly, even after just a few weeks of regular exercise.
Oh, and get a good chair if you are sitting a lot, it's definitely worth it.
John Sarno's book "The Mind Body Prescription" is the book that's always mentioned on HN when this topic comes up. But there's a more up to date book with actual science to back up what you described, it's called "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon. In this book he uses the term "neuroplastic pain" for those sort of pains, it's also called central sensitization in some research papers.
Anyone suffering from any sort of chronic pain should give this book or a similar book a try.
Similar to you, I convinced myself out a chronic tendonitis that would just not disappear even after physical therapy. It was gone a few weeks later. Just by following the recommendations in the book. It's basically self talk therapy.
I had a very similar experience with insomnia. My whole life I couldn't fall asleep on time. At one point, having tried everything, I just stopped caring. If I didn't sleep much one night, then whatever, I've survived many sleep deprived days. So I totally stopped thinking about sleep. Then I just started getting sleepy around 10pm every night and falling asleep soon after. I think that insomnia is perhaps the most mental of all ailments. I also started reading by candlelight at night and that helped too.
This was realized by me after reading the sleep solution by Chris Winters, who also has a podcast that has the same theme.
Everyone has insomnia sometimes, it's abnormal to be able to sleep easily. Candlelight is bad for the air around you and for your eyes the flickering damages your eyes, although the higher CO2 might help with oxygen diffusion.
Didn't know that about flickering, interesting. Maintaining the candle properly by e.g. trimming the wick does help with a clean burn. Beeswax has almost no flicker and gives off light that's the most similar to sunlight, but it's quite expensive.
Refer to the refresh rate on your screen and make it even slower. There is a such thing as candle meditation, so the flickering not always regarded as bad. It'll definitely tire your eyes due to them fatiguing, Ikea makes LED candles if you're interested and anudril firmware flashlights have candle mode too.
> I also started reading by candlelight at night and that helped too.
Ha, i wish i could read in bed without falling asleep. One or two books did something to my brain where i could read them in bed, all the rest i have to fight sleep and re-read paragraphs after 20 mins max.
Recovery from addiction became so much more meaningful when you realize that failing at recovery is part of the process.
I was trying to keep a death grip on sobriety. The clenching and clawing while putting up appearances... life brings us sadness. sometimes at times of desperation, the only thing I have left is my reaction.
When I look back on my mistakes, it all feels insane; the pathology of feedback loop neurosis had me chasing tornados with a butterfly net. What would catching it do for me?
Recognize the stillness where you are _right now_ my friend, and we can sit here for awhile and watch those clouds join the others as they roll over the horizon.
This struck a chord with me. If you don't mind, could you please explain more about how you changed your mindset? It seems like you're talking about letting go as opposed to maintaining tight control.
I've had the same experience with money. When I thought I had no money, I was poor. Then I changed to a "rich" mindset and my bank account has been full ever since.
Poverty is not a mindset. But a particular mindset can lead one to poverty and keep them there.
Say, spending 3 hours to save $10 is usually a bad deal, that time can be invested much better. But if one keeps doing that, they end up in a situation where spending 3 hours for $10 is what they have to do, because they don't have a spare $10, and there are pressing needs.
It's a trap. But it ensnares you through a mindset, not through a want of $10 initially.
> if one keeps doing that, they end up in a situation where spending 3 hours for $10 is what they have to do, because they don't have a spare $10
To add to this: if one keeps doing that, or they're unlucky: Being born into the wrong family, or socioeconomic class. Being the victim of a crime. Having your transportation stolen or break down. Etc.
If spending that time causes you to lose your job then yes. I can only see that for addicts really. I guess you could be addicted to that pursuit though in a negative way. I wonder how Richard Thaler would see it. In that sense it probably is the same reward pathway in the brain. Interesting possibly worth a phd.
You can definitely become povertybrained. My heartrate gets over 120 any time I am buying something that costs more than ten dollars. And thanks to inflation, that's basically everything now. I know it's stupid, but I guess we all came from somewhere.
Well… true poverty is a real thing. But there is a view that you are poor even when you just don’t have as much as others. There are people who get pay rises (significant ones) and who find they are still poor.
There is a mindset to some degree with feelings of poverty. Though, yes, real poverty is a reality.
Exactly this same thing happened to me! I now realize I had an impoverished mind and saw every tbh I got from the perspective of a poor person from a poor town instead of just a person from somewhere like anyone else.
Basically, the news was “everyone is getting rsi from computers!” And then everyone did. And the news fad faded and most cases, obviously many people do get it, also faded away. The brain is weird.
Gosh, I remember when I was a kid, and my Sunday school teacher told me that all my father had to do was pray to get rid of his asthma! I came home and told him, and, well, he was very nice about it, but it doesn't work that way.
Your idea that RSI is in your head has the same issue: "It doesn't work that way." SOME pain is in the mind. Some pain in the body can be mitigated with mental techniques. Some.
> all pain is just based on expectation
This statement is wildly false.
Now, I studied pain control, and when I fell into a hole and was injured in Bali, I was able to function and even continue to speak Indonesian until I got to medical help and could pass out, simply with breath control. I almost never take painkillers. The technical of detaching from pain has significant value, and I have taught it to others.
But some things are wildly painful and can't be dismissed that way...
You know, I'm not even going to type about some miserable things I have briefly experienced, and some horrible things I saw happen to other people, other stoic people even, or about objectively provable imaging (X-rays, etc) of damage caused to people by RSI.
Life is too short for such downers. We both know they exist.
Your ideas do not agree with the consensus of medicine, or the experience of humans. You should re-examine your beliefs.
I do hope you never get first-hand experience of how very wrong you are.
Can't say anything on the internet without someone coming in to shit on it and remind everyone that SOME things don't apply to ME. They never said it was ALL pain. They never said it was a panacea. They strongest they said was "It worked for me" and "I think there's some merit to it".
> "The technical of detaching from pain has significant value, and I have taught it to others. But some things are wildly painful and can't be dismissed that way..."
They explicitly aren't dismissing the pain, controlling the pain, being stoic about the pain, or arguing that you should ignore or suffer through pain. Read it again.
Fair enough. Like I say, take it with a grain of salt. Certainly, I'm no expert on pain, only what I personally went through with RSI.
While my understanding/explanation might be wrong the result was undeniable: I had terrible RSI and now I don't.
I personally could care less why it happened. All I know is that it happened, and this is what I did to make it happen. Ultimately if it works, it works. And you can't deny in this particular case, that it worked.
If expressing my experience can help at least 1 person, in the same way that someone else had expressed the very same experience to me, then I'll take my chances.
If I have a headache, all I have to do is take a shower to get rid of it. I suspect it’s because my brain is so overwhelmed by sense that it doesn’t have the capacity to emit pain. Probably wrong, but I don’t really care how it works. It just does.
Given the myriad comments in agreement, you seem to be either behind on research or research itself is behind. I hope you’re able to expand your thinking.
My severe mouse-clicking induced RSI turned out to be not caused by the clicking itself, but constantly being in a "ready to click" state, i.e: holding your click-fingers(...) slightly tensed on/over the mouse buttons all the time.
Simultaneously this hinders precision movements with the mouse, so my other fingers also tensed up as a result of it.
The solution that cured my RSI for 90% was to route mouse button triggers to keys on an external number-pad, which I operate with my other hand. (I use the "Karabiner" app on macOS to route keys).
In other words: I move the mouse with one hand, and do the clicking with the other hand. This relieves so much tension my RSI was basically gone in a few months.
That seems harder to solve, but if it becomes a problem; maybe using a keyboard with more resistive keys (which sounds counterintuitive) might enable you to rest your fingers on the keys in a more relaxt way.
I think you might have had temporary pain that created a bad position and a lack of flexibility (the words I want to use are typically the words I don't know in English, sorry if I'm not accurate, I try).
The same thing happened to my left ankle. A double sprain (both tear) made me walk with an angle and a locked feet for years, which didn't help with rehab at all and caused pain (because I was locking it in uncomfortable positions). Part of it was psychosomatic: like you said, expectation of pain, most of it was real pain caused by myself.
Also I stopped doing sport, kept eating the same, became fat and changed carrier towards CS, because clearly I couldn't keep working my jobs without the ability to run.
So definitely not as simple as you made it to be but true enough that this can be good advice to people with chronic pain.
Sounds like an extreme example, but i know this as the biopsychosocial model of pain, which as far as i know is the current state of science. Your pain experience will often be created not only by expectations and underlying anatomy, but also how the people around you think and behave about it.
It people tell you constantly something causes back pain, odds are you'll be more susceptible to experience it yourself. Even though your back is physically fine.
I had debilitating carpal tunnel typing pain twice in my life, one in college and once 10 years later.
Both times was when RSI ) carpal tunnel was a very popular fad topic to discuss. Both times my interventions had no effect and the pain cleared up on its own.
I never developed "good typing habits" and when smartphones came out I developed new terrible habits, but that never caused RSI / carpal tunnel pain.
lol I just made it up. But a lot of this knowledge is based on a book called The Happiness Trap which describes all these interactions in much greater detail and by an actual mental health professional.
My post is kind of a shitty abridged version of that which does it no justice.
I agree in part with this philosophy and had success for many years that way, but at some point I started having pain of which simply observing just revealed to me that it was my posture that was partly to blame, at which point I did everything I could to optimize the ergonomics of my workstation. So I conclude that the observational mental approach has merit, but so do ergonomic keyboards and a properly arranged chair and monitor which can pick up where the mental aspect leaves off. At least for me.
I had the same issue and may have posted about it, but for me it took a whole year while it gradually got better after accepting that it was mental (and only then after a doctor did a whole batter of tests and actually investigated the issue, and came up with nothing).
Not a doctor, but I would be worried if there are other similar symptoms elsewhere in the body, or if your injured wrist had an sudden/forceful injury recently (eg falling down and breaking your wrist type, not a gradual buildup/repetitive injury). Chronic damage/injury is definitely a concern but it won't get worse by itself without something else. But going to the GP/family doctor isn't a bad idea at all.
Right, that's why I was only ready to believe it after the doctor did the battery of tests. The checks were very thorough: nerves, vascular system, blood tests, etc. They took a week, and I received diagnoses from doctors of two specialties which were reviewed together.
Interestingly, I got the idea from a coder on his blog detailing how he literally tried everything for his RSI, and wasn't until he tried this approach that it all went away.
Some people (like myself) must fail every single way before finding the solution (because we're stubborn) but this also keenly describes the idea of "the solution is the problem". It's not until we give up, do we actually find what we're looking for.
I think this is what RSI represents for a lot of people. It's such a shitty experience that they literally pour all their effort to try and resolve it, not realising that it's actually making it worse and only until they let go, will it be resolved.
I have occasional wrist pain (competitive starcraft and being a software engineer not a great combo) - the only real fix for me was going to the gym a lot. Now that I go to the gym 3-4 times a week, most all of my RSI issues have vanished. Strongly recommend. There is something crushing about wrist pain when your entire value is wrapped up in what you can make computers do.
Also, I love the style of this blog with the chat-replies from friends.
For people reading this comment about RSI and considering this recommendation: please see a doctor and a physical therapist first before you adopt a gym routine. It is very, very easy to hurt yourself if you don't know what you're doing and you already have an injury. Speaking from personal experience.
People always chime in with this and it's weird. It's just scaring people and making them think exercise is more dangerous than being sedentary (it isn't). Have some common sense and don't jump into something that hurts and you'll be fine. Watch some videos of how to do established exercises, start with far less weight than you think you can handle and slowly work up to a higher amount over the course of weeks (so you know you're not bending in weird ways), and be consistent with it.
You can hurt yourself doing anything. Nobody says to consult a doctor before doing anything else, but there's lots of fear mongering around exercise. Going from sitting at a desk all day to doing some weightless squats, curling tiny weights, and bench pressing a bar isn't going to ruin your body. It's only risky if you're physically disabled and already know it.
I even see people saying you should see a doctor before you start walking or jogging. No. Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong. If you just feel a burn in your muscles after a while and an ache in your muscles the next day, you're fine. You're getting stronger.
The recommendation was not "see a doctor before starting an exercise routine if you are sedentary".
It was "If you are going to try to use an intense exercise pattern as a treatment for an RSI, consult a doctor first".
> Start slow, and if it majorly hurts your bones and joints, then talk to a doctor because you may have something wrong.
If you have an RSI, you already have something wrong; that's your starting point. And a lot of common RSIs affecting the risk and elbow can have a lot of impact on ability to safely do lots of common exercises (especially with free weights) at weights way (like, literally, an order of magnitude or more) below what would even be useful from a strength perspective. And, yeah, the right focused exercises can help, and if you've got a decent doctor, they (or, more likely, the physical therapist they refer you to), will actually provide you both appropriate exercises for your particular RSI and also appropriate guidelines on how to avoid exacerbating it with other exercise.
Don't let hubris get in the way of getting an informed medical opinion when it comes to not making your existing injuries worse with exercise. I'm speaking from experience as someone who once thought like you do, at least when it came to my own health. Take injuries seriously.
The two times I had RSI it actually turned out to be a postural issue. I never would have figured that out without going to physical therapists, who were able to figure it out in 15 minutes. They gave me specific instructions on how to hold my body and some exercises to do, and things cleared up in a few weeks.
RSI and similar mean there's something specific that needs fixing. PTs can dramatically speed up that process; trying to solve it on your own can result in more damage simply because you're not fixing the problem.
I'd agree that exercise is all well and good. But you should also make sure you're fixing the right problem.
It has been a while, so I don't remember the exact details. In both cases, the symptoms were pain and paraesthesia in my hands and lower arm, although the locations might have been somewhat different. In one, the issue was that I was holding my head and neck forward, sort of cantilevered out. This caused muscle inflammation in the back of my neck, irritating a nearby nerve. In the other, it had to do with holding my shoulders forward, causing a nerve impingement on my chest. In both cases, it was part of an overall hunched-forward posture, so... you know, "don't do that". :-) I don't remember the specific exercises, but I think they had something to do with strengthening opposing muscles.
Right, I think a good takeaway is: In extreme cases of anything, you are likely to want to get doctor input -- but presently "seeing the doctor" is in no way a guarantee of anything?
More like, do your homework on whatever it that's wrong with you. Often, a doctor's input is very helpful, but that too comes with limitations and caveats.
Doctors and PTs never helped my wrist, forearm, and arm pain but finding a really good personal trainer and going to the gym 3+ times a week for several months is what finally did it
The doctors just prescribed the PT and the PTs had me doing basic stretches that ChatGPT would done a better job with
The vast majority of doctors, when presented with a patient asking such a thing, will do a 30 second "examination" (if you're lucky), then spout some platitudes about exercise being beneficial in moderation (which you could have gotten from a lifestyle magazine or a fortune cookie), then usher you out after 5 minutes so they can see the next patient waiting in line.
Unless you know the doctor personally, or are rich enough to see high-class private practitioners who will actually pay attention to you because of your money and/or status, that would be a gargantuan waste of time. Needless to say, I too am speaking from personal experience.
This might be true if you just go ask a generic doctor with no training on the subject but someone trained in sports medicine or a physiotherapist can be very helpful.
In the US at least the most helpful is to find an out of network doctor, pay them the $200 for 1hr detailed examination, where they don't offload you to an assistant after 10 min, and use that + the offered program as a guide book, and never book another session. Much better than doing 15 in-network therapy sessions for $15 each. (hand wavy on insurance costs but you get the gist)
I’ve found it helps to go to your doctor with a game plan. Research your issue, figure out what the desired course of diagnosis and/or treatment is, then ask for it at the doctor’s.
They will usually just give you the referral you want. They may ask you to do some wrist exercises first, but if you are persistent, it will happen.
Think of primary care as talking to first level support at the call center. If you already know your problem needs a specialist, lead the conversation in that direction.
There are almost no medical contraindications to exercise, so this is meh advice. Feel free to consult professionals, but there is no need to abstain from exercise due to fear of doing something "wrong".
Obviously don't do things clearly aggravating your symptoms, but there is no magic diagnostic that would make a doctor tell you you can't exercise because of your wrists.
No no some doctor with their 8 or more years of formal professional education knows nothing compared with some rando on the internet who may have read a book by some other rando and has an anecdotal testimonial. This is patently true because I read it on my corner of the internet all the time. And sometimes hear it on talk radio.
I had bad RSI for ages. What helps me and other comments have agreed is pulling excercises. Specifically I have a bar at home attached to the ceiling. Just hanging from the bar as long as you can and doing that regularly seems to stretch out the right muscles/tendons. Don't over do it but at the beginning I could only do 20 seconds. Now I can hold on for 1 to 2 minutes depending on the day.
I have very little wrist pain any more.
I also have a kinesis pro keyboard and a MX master mouse. They both add to the improvement.
Flip side to this, is I’ve had Carpal Tunnel for a while now, had surgery 2 years ago. It’s somewhat better and I am now active at the gym and in general it has helped a lot but extreme gripping such as deadhangs, deadlifts and heavy rows actually aggravates my symptoms. I started using straps for any weight over 50kg and my hands have got a lot better.
I’ve found that when you’re going from (weak, sedentary) => (strong, active) it can sometimes be difficult to discern what activities are good or bad for your pain. Sometimes you need to work through pain to find relief and strength on the other side, but sometimes working through pain just leads to more pain. The boundaries aren’t always clear at the time.
Yes..don't push past your pain limits. I have an old elbow injury from climbing. In the past if I did too much with it like pull ups it would inflame and then be useless again for weeks.
But slowly building up the hang time and then moving to 1 pull-up then to 2 and slowly over months to 5 and then 10 seems to keep it happy.
Be careful and slow but consistent and results should be good.
This is interesting, it reminds me of the (sort of) famous "tree hanging" exercise. Which goes like this. Go to a wooded area, find a tree with a strong branch above your head. Grab it and hang off it for a while. Do it daily for a brief time.
Supposedly this exercise helps in all sorts of problems that arise in a sedentary lifestyle (hands, arms, back etc).
Now, the only problem with doing it here is that most trees here are pines and strong branches start 20m above the ground...
You can get a climbing hangboard and hang it over a doorway. Do a pyramid training (2, 4, 6, 8, 6, 4, 2s with 5s pause in between) and your fingers and wrists will get much stronger
I use a Beastmaker 1000 hangboard and follow the Emil's Sub-max Daily Fingerboard Routine on the app Crimpd each day. Absolutely amazing results within a month. I really suggest everyone gives it a try.
You can also do it in the gym, if they have one of the "machines" shown at the very right in this picture: https://www.fit-star.de/Resources/Public/Content/Specials/He... - not sure how they're called or how common they are, but you put your lower arms on the armrests, grab the handles, rest your back against the blue ball and just let your legs hang. Then you can do some ab exercises.
I also fixed my RSI issues with exercise, though I get a lot more benefit from cardio.
I find it extremely helpful to take a mid-workday walk, ~20 minutes, usually after lunch. My brain turns off to digest anyway, so I lose little useful work time. Adopting the walk pretty much solved my issue.
I speculate that my issues are blood-flow related - I’ve always had cold hands/feet, suggesting suboptimal circulation. All the prolonged sitting then starves the muscles in my wrists of the oxygen needed to keep typing. Roughly in line with this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16640514/
Obviously, there are many possible root causes for RSI conditions. But a midday walk is a nice thing regardless, and may be worth a try.
Interesting, I've been coding professionally for about 20 years now, and never had any wrist problems. I've been pretty inconsistent with working out, but have always kept a pull up bar in my home, and even when not working out often I do a few pull ups here and there. Maybe these things are related. Never really thought about it.
Yeah, at first when the RSI pain started, it felt it was really scary. Like viscerally scary in a way that is hard to describe unless you have felt that kind of fear. realistically, though knowing that I can use this tool to be able to code, even without the use of my hands, it makes me just feel calm. Obviously, I wouldn't want to lose use of my hands, but should that reality happen it is something that I could actually live with and tolerate. Would suck to give up video games entirely though. It's amazingly ironic that coding without your hands, ends up being faster than coding with your hands, but it wouldn't be reality if it wasn't ironic eh?
I felt the exact same. The mounting pain, seemingly leading up to needing to take extended medical leave, the feeling of helplessness where interacting with computers in any capacity was excruciating, and feeling... just utterly useless was terrible. Everything I do/am felt like it involved my hands. Talon took me out of that. It was difficult to learn while in pain (if anyone reading this has the spare cycles, I highly suggest learning before you need it), but it entirely freed me from that downward spiral. It's a kind of security that (temporary) health can't quite match – knowing that the accomodations for disability are there, and are really good. Being abled is a temporary state. (For example, I lose the use of my hands while I'm eating!)
There was a book I can't recall the name of, in which one of the characters (a human) is stranded on an alien planet. He agrees to a certain type of relationship with his alien benefactor, but doesn't understand the cultural implications of what he's agreeing to. His fingers are lengthened through a medical procedure, so long that he can't hold anything, can't work, can't ever exist on his own again – he exists now only as a thing of beauty, a token for the alien to show off. He spends his days in what I picture as a courtyard in a roman villa, to be shown off to guests. This confers social status on his owner because of the resources it takes to keep a helpless sapient being fed, clothed, and happy. (The last one is debatable.) It is seen as one of the most intimate types of relationships in this culture. I think about this a lot.
> Would suck to give up video games entirely though.
You don't necessarily have to do that. I'm adding voice recognition into the game I'm working on right now, for example. It helps that it's a turn-based strategy game to begin with, though.
And there are players that manage to play games with limited or no mobility in their hands at all, with the right accessible controllers.
Playing games on PC has been a trigger for me for a long time and gets uncomfortable quickly. I got a PSVR2 headset last year and it's a great way for me to play games and not be in the same mostly static position all day. I can play games on it without any discomfort (other than wearing the headset itself which isn't great if it's a really hot day) and you can switch up sitting/standing which I also like.
I have a Quest 2 and I've had to limit my playing of it not because of wrist RSI but it seems like I tend to accidentally overextend my upper forearm muscles anytime I play anything twitchy in it, like Beat Saber or action games, and my forearm muscles stretch or tear or something and take a while to heal back up. Super annoying.
I don't think I'm doing anything too crazy with it either, so it's a little worrying, since it's happened pretty much every time I've played it lately.
> I'm adding voice recognition into the game I'm working on right now, for example.
Very cool! I've also found that it's helpful when the game supports different controllers too. I absolutely cannot play games with keyboard & mouse but plugging in an Xbox controller to the PC is completely fine. I'm sure people out there have the opposite experience as me, too.
Yeah, I can't do WASD movement that often anymore without pretty bad pain in my fingers (noticed how bad it got for the first time with Halo Infinite), so I prefer using a controller myself nowadays.
My game will definitely have controller support also (most of it does now, a few screens are a little spotty I'm planning to fix in the next month or two, and I don't yet have multiple controller support, that may have to wait until later). But it's also fully playable with just clicking a mouse as well.
The thing that seems to counteract my wrist pain is pulling exercises. Essentially anything where the wrist is pulled away from the forearm: pull ups, deadlifts, bent over rows, even stretches against the wall. Pushing against the wrist made things worse for me, but the pulling exercises counteract it.
I couldn't do push-ups when starting with a personal trainer due to the wrist pain, but the exercises helped; I'm not sure if it was pulling action, or grip strength / forearm training though; the theory with the latter is that the large muscles pick up more of the slack and offload the smaller painful muscles.
that, or just improved blood flow allowing repairs and trapped shit to be taken away.
Competitive RTS, programming and being able to stand on my hands for minutes at the time left me with wrists that hurt all the time.
After I started climbing all wrist and back pain has disappeared.
I would also advise seeing a doctor but I'll say my doctor recommended me something very similar. I'm not able to go to the gym but what has helped me is I have a bucket with rice in it (I guess you could also use sand?) and I just twist my hand within the bucket of rice while holding and squeezing a tennis ball in it. Do it in a circular motion.
One thing I thought was interesting is he said that ortho doctors don't really think ergo keyboards help. I use a kinesis advantage 360 where I can (I still prefer a regular keyboard) I don't see much in the way beyond help with shoulder pain. I've had surgery to fix my RSI/ tunnel nerve inflammation. Anyways where I'm going with this is I do think exercise is a big help.
No one setup helped me either. What did help me was recognizing that I had a problem and actively changing things - like varying small setup changes like angle to the table. That was mostly enough to stop stressing always the same parts.
The Kinesis (and now the Moonlander) has really helped with the pain in my hands from severe nerve damage (from a coma) though. I understand it's not exactly RSI, so the mechanism is different. I agree with you about exercise. At this point, I'm nervous to rely on just one single change, so a multi-frontal attack is needed. A consistent stretching routine is probably what helped me deal with pain the most...
My remedy for the RSI in my right hand (stiffness and pain in the fingers and knuckles) is gripping as hard as possible. If I work out I remind myself to grip everything as hard as I possibly can, and I add light dumbbell exercises so I can specifically focus on gripping as hard as possible. If I'm at my desk or wherever I also occasionally make a fist as hard and tense as I can. The pain has gone away and my hand has its full range of motion again. Of course, for all I know I could be doing something wrong and my hand will blow out in a few years. Just adding my anecdotal experience.
>It fixes most modern afflictions of sedentary < 60 years old people
Under physical therapy supervision, my >60-year old mother is exercising fairly vigorously (for her age) and has been seeing great improvements in her overall health and strength, so don't let age be a factor and get professional help if needed.
Oh yeah for sure, it's just that with age more and more things have more to do with luck and genetics than exercise, but it's still extremely important of course.
Strengthening is definitely a huge part of it if not most .. more often than not.
A few other things helped, if you have them use your benefits to verify with a physiotherapist or professional.
Wrist support:
M-brace makes an excellent and minimally invasive strap. Good to west while sleeping if you twist it while sleeping. There’s an older version of this which was an angled bracket which works in many positions. Helps relieve from fatigue or not get fatigued as easily.
Laptops are generally awful ergonomics especially if you aren’t as active as may need to be. Invest in an ergonomic keyboards, ergomice, vertical mice, trackpads. Variety is the best ergonomics. Minimize or stop using laptop keyboards. I use Logitech k860, Microsoft ErgoSculpt keyboard, kinesis freestyle widest separation at times, even though they are not mechanical. Slim keys are actually pretty good.
If you have a standing desk use it more often to change up the angles and use different muscles.
Strengthening:
- A gyroball works well. Builds up the core muscles.
I've found this true for a lot of unexpected things. It makes sense in the end, but is a little unintuitive at first that lots of deadlifting completely fixed some crippling back pain I was going through at one point.
