Finger pain, rabbit holes, and refining my dev setup
Finger pain, rabbit holes, and refining my dev setup
This week I have been concious of a pain in my left index finger. Its something I have had for a while, but I have been ignoring it. Mostly because I thought it was from an indoor bouldering session, but now I am feeling more like it is to do with my typing, and down the rabbit hole I went.
Finger pain
The pain is in my left index finger, in the knuckle, maybe a little behind it. It is similar to some tendon issues I’ve had before when I have been climbing, so it must be the same thing surely.
But I’ve only climbed once in the last 9 months, and that was a light session because of a shoulder injury, maybe its something else.
Rabbit holes
I’ve been down the rabbit hole of working out what it could be, and the most likely candidate is my keyboard and lazy/poor typing. I can touch type, but I don’t always and tend to drift back to pecking at keys, that coupled with changing to a low profile Lofree keyboard I think has slowly been chipping away at my finger joints when I’ve been bottoming out the keys.
The fix
Keyboard
The imidiate fix was to change back to my Ducky One3 SF keyboard, it has a more normal profile, so more travel, and uses Cherry MX Brown switches which whilst they don’t need much force to push, they do have a tactile bump that helps me stop pressing when I reach it, 2 days into using it again and my finger is already feeling better.
Back to 10 finger typing
I can touch type, not amazingly well, but I got lazy with it and have been 4 finger typing recently. I’ve been more concious of using all of my fingers, and naturally that has lightened the load on my index finger.
I’ve been using keybr.com 3 times a day to give me a refresher, and with the aim of giving my slowish typing speed a boost.
Layers
The rabit hole has also introduced me to Layers. I already used Karabiner-Elements with my Ducky keyboard to remap the option and command keys to the left of the keyboard so that they reflect my macbook’s keyboard layout, so my next step will be to add a symbols layer to the keyboard so that I can use the capslock to activate it, and then use the home row for common programming symbols, brackets, etc. to reduce the reaching on the keyboard.
New keyboard
This has also put me on the track for a new keyboard, I’ve been eyeing up some entry level split keyboards on aliexpress, and I would like to try a bowl shaped board like the Kenisis but that is way too much money at the moment so one will have to appeat on eBay for a lower price.
The roundup
I’ve been happy with my problem solving, its made an immidiate difference, I have not had to buy anything and I have learned new things about my setup to make me a more efficent engineer.