r/crkbd

Hey r/crkbd,

I have repetitive strain injury in my carpal tunnel. It really only triggers when clicking my (vertical) mouse. So, ideally, the design I'm looking for is low mouse movement and moving click operations off the right index finger.

A corne keyboard and a modal text editor (helix) gets me all the way there when text editing. It avoids clicking altogether, and my wrist can stay in one stable location. Unfortunately, most of my other software engineering workflows around text editing are built for GUI use and have tons of unavoidable clicking.

So I'm ideating on how to modify or supplement a corne with a pointing device, and how to design the keyboard layout for clicking. I was curious if anyone else has been down this road and has perspective on what works and what doesn't. Like, should I use a separate large trackball? Where's a good spot to move the click keys? What's a good device + workflow that's about as fast as mousing?

I am willing to invest in time and train skills to "get good". I literally get a stab in the wrist for reverting back!

Currently I swap to a left handed mouse with some extra buttons for ctrl, shift, ctrl-c, and ctrl+v. That works ok, but it's messy. I misclick a lot.

Thanks!

Hawk handwired hotswap 3D-printed mechanical ergo keyboard with molded tin tenting weights and Mechanical Latched Pushbutton Bluetooth Selector (with permanent zero energy 'display' function).

I have a 34 key The Skull keyboard and I want to copy it's keymaps to a 46 keys Corne keyboard, just because I got used to the 34 keys and I only want to use those on the Corne.

How can I do that without changing every key in Vial ? is there a faster way to do it ? maybe something in the CLI ?