Dear Lobsters, in recent months I’ve been afflicted with increasingly crippling RSI in both my wrists, to the point where I’m becoming incapable of functioning both professionally and as an artist at the computer. While medical professionals continue to be puzzled over the exact nature of my RSI and how to counter it, I’m researching means by which I can combat the source of the problem: Mouse usage. So far, I am finding that on days where I do not move a cursor, my pain tends to be dramatically lower… It seems that keyboard usage is much easier on my malfunctioning tendons. I am interested in hearing about similar experiences and resulting setups, having spent all of my time with computers on mouse-first environments (mostly KDE Plasma and Windows.) I suspect Lobsters has a large community of people with such histories, and indeed searching back through the archives has led to some things I should try first:

• Scrolling WMs like PaperWM and Niri (people seem to nigh-universally like these more than “traditional” tiling WMs)
• Vimulator for Firefox
• The Helix editor for a first-class modern terminal editor (ideally with Vim bindings)
• The Space Mouse for CAD and Blender usage
• Alternative keyboards; I use a standard split keyboard now, but the Moonlander was too abrupt a departure for my tastes some years back… Maybe time to try again

Since it seems I’ll be forced to throw out decades of GUI experience to combat this issue (especially as KDE Plasma no longer can be plug-ined with, say, i3 WM thanks to Wayland), I’m looking for as many allegories, shared experiences, and resulting battle stations as possible.