Foot pedals to heal from repetitive strain injury
These last two months I have been using my keyboard a whole lot and I managed to over-tax my left pinky. The flesh on the opposite side of the knuckle grew so sore I ended up not being able to use the pinky anymore. Stubbornly, I thought the project needed to be finished. I was on a roll! I bought a couple of foot pedals for $17 each and set them up underneath my desk. Left pedal for Ctrl and right pedal for SHIFT.
It ended up working out well and two weeks later, I can say that the muscles, joints, and whatever had been worn out before have now healed. The pedals enabled me to power through the recovery and continue to work on my project despite missing an important finger. Which leads me to a few realizations.
I had not taken workplace ergo training seriously until this incident. If you develop a repetitive strain injury (RSI) it takes a while to heal and for that time, your effectiveness takes a significant hit. My RSI seemed to sneak up on me gradually. It was one of things that I thought would go away if I ignored it, but instead the pain got slowly worse. Take breaks and pay attention to your body.
Try to avoid contortions. Use larger compound groups of joints and muscles to perform common actions instead of isolating the stress in a smaller group.
I learned that the left pinky has a tough job to do if it belongs to a vim/tmux programmer. Many things in vim and tmux require use of Ctrl and SHIFT in conjunction with other keys. I tunnel around a lot and used to think that meant it would be better to avoid relying on much customization. Now I add ergo binds for last-window and last-pane in all of my .tmux.confs.