Daniel Taylor wrote: > On 05/26/2011 04:50 PM, r j wrote: > >> What do you do to keep your hands in good shape? >> > Coming at this kind of late, but the martial arts Aikido and Chin-na > both have a strong emphasis on hand and wrist strength and flexibility. > > There are several Aikido studios in the twin cities, though you'd have > to check out the kung-fu studios to find one that includes chin-na in > their curriculum. > > Fitness and health are generally important to good mental performance, > so the time and money you would spend on martial arts training would > definitely not be wasted. > When using something like Emacs or an IDE, hunt and peck is probably more ergonomic than Qwerty. Also, everytime you move your whole arm (from the shoulder on down) from keyboard to the mouse is approximately equivalent to another 10 minutes of keyboarding. RMS of rms and rsi fame (also started gnu and Emacs) probably wouldn't have injured his hands so much if he could have stuck with the Symbolics Space Cadet keyboard. The best solution I have come up with so far is Dvorak layout, mod key layout symmetrical with space bar (super, alt, ctl, space, ctl, alt, super, hyper) swap Caps-lock and backslash-bar keys. Ideal for Emacs would be split space-bar (backspace-space) with shift keys directly right and left (i.e. all mod keys on same row as space-bar). Then left paren would be shift-backspace and right paren would be shift-space. With that setup and keyboard could be played more like a musical instrument. ed p.s. I looks like distro glut is a bigger enemy than feature bloat when it comes to personalizing i/o devices. I get more reliable results using the Windows registry and Keytweak than I do using xkb, xmodmap, and other supposedly rationally designed Linux configuration utilities. How can I turn my ubuntu meerkat install into into a single user OS so it works reliably?