Having developed wrist and finger joint issues, I’ve gone in search of a better keyboard, and that led me to GeekHack.
Oh, somehow I missed this bit.
It’s very likely that you can improve your situation quite substantially while using whatever keyboard you’re currently using, but as other folks have mentioned, if this pain starts having an impact on your ability to work, you really should see a doctor.
The most important thing to do is make sure that your wrists are in as straight and neutral a shape as possible. To achieve this, it’s important to type with your palms and wrists “floating” in the air rather than resting on the table, or even a normal palmrest (those are best used while resting, not while actively typing). You also don’t want to have your wrists bending downward, as happens when the keyboard is flat and the desk is very tall. Instead, you want to have your keyboard tilted so that the angle of your forearms/hands (remember, these are pretty much in the same plane, since your wrists are straight) is parallel to the angle to the top of the keyboard / perpendicular to the axis of the switches.
Most tables/desks are too high relative to most chairs for ideally comfortable typing. They are set up for writing with pen and paper, or eating food, or whatever, not for typing on a keyboard. And the top of the keyboard is typically higher still. If your desk is too high, that’s definitely suboptimal, but you can make the most of it by tilting your keyboard (using flip-down feet, or by piling stuff under the back) until the switchplate/pcb are parallel to your forearms, as mentioned in the previous paragraph. The better option here is to raise your chair higher and/or lower your desk (or e.g. use a pull-out keyboard tray), or for some folks even better, switch to a standing desk setup at least part of the time. If you can, get your chair/desk to a height where you can type with your forearms approximately parallel to the floor, or even angled slightly downward, and then tilt your keyboard so that, again, the keyboard plate/pcb is parallel to your forearms.
If you experience severe wrist/finger pain, one thing you can do to take some of the load off your finger joints is to try to let your forearms bounce up and down a bit, and take some of the impact load from your typing, and even contribute a bit to the typing force. This depends on having your wrists floating in the air and not resting your arms on anything. (Alternately, I know some folks who have had good success with armrests that support the arms about halfway up the forearm, but ones that are sufficiently mobile to support comfortable typing and using a mouse, etc. can be mechanically complicated and expensive. Everyone’s a bit different, YMMV, etc.)
You can often get some improvement in comfort by trying to sit up straight and not slouch. But I also know some folks who work full time lying down on their backs.
One problem with many/most rubber dome keyboards is that the keys only actuate at the bottom of the keystroke, rather than partway through the stroke, as mechanical switches do. As a result, the switches often fail to reliably actuate unless the keys are actively pressed all the way to the bottom. On the worst keyboards, it’s necessary to really mash the keys down to avoid dropped keystrokes. Because of this, most typists on rubber dome keyboards type with dramatically more force than necessary to press the switch down, and end up causing a hard impact at the bottom of each keystroke. This puts substantial amounts of stress on all your joints, and especially so if your palms/wrists are resting on something, preventing your arm muscles from taking some of the shock. You want to be typing as lightly and springily as you can get away with without missed keys. A mechanical keyboard will help quite a bit with that; since they actuate pretty reliably noticeably before the bottom of the stroke, it’s not necessary to press the key all the way down, and so it’s possible to type without “bottoming out” the switch at all, or at least without too hard an impact at the bottom. (Bottoming out the switch isn’t a problem, per se; the problem is using much more force than necessary and getting a hard impact.)
Even on a standard keyboard, it’s possible to type with the wrists relatively straight, and the hands/arms angled outward a bit. One thing that I find helps is using “non-standard” fingers for the bottom row of the left hand, along the lines of this diagram:
That way, when the left hand is angled a bit, flexing the fingers from their home row positions will put them right on the appropriate bottom row keys.
Beyond typing form changes alone, there are many other things you can change to improve your comfort and avoid injuries: First, type less! Don’t sit typing for 5+ hours per day if it hurts. Take it easy and let your wrists and fingers heal up a bit. Second, take breaks! Every 10 minutes take your hands off the keyboard and stretch them a bit. Every 30 minutes, stand up and stretch your legs out and walk around the room. Try sitting in different positions, or switching between standing and sitting desks. Recline on the couch reading a book for a while. Write some notes with pen and paper stretched on your belly on the floor... or whatever, get creative. Every few hours, get up and move around a bit, walk from one coffee shop to another, or from a dorm to the library, or take a walk outside around the office building, or go walk to a restaurant for lunch, whatever.
Next, eating healthy, getting enough sleep, not working when you’re sick, and avoiding stress in your work/relationship/friends/family makes a huge difference to your body’s general resilience and stamina. People who are stressed out, especially when they don’t get enough sleep, quite often suffer from inflammation in all kinds of places, manifesting as back pain, or wrist pain, or leg pain, or headaches, etc.
It’s certainly true that split keyboards, symmetric-stagger keyboards, column-stagger keyboards, or even radically sculpted keyboards like the Maltron or Kinesis Advantage can make typing more comfortably easier than on a standard keyboard. The easier and more comfortable the keyboard makes typing, typically the further away from standard ANSI/QWERTY/IBM layout it gets, and therefore has a steeper learning curve / longer adaptation period.
The best upcoming keyboard I know of for someone who wants to have a very short adaptation period is the Matias ErgoPro
http://matias.ca/ergopro/pc/ which is IMO fairly reasonably priced at $200. But as I said before, there are also occasional used split mechanical keyboards to be found on ebay for <$100, if your budget is tight. Takes doing some hunting though. The Ergodox and similar-ish keyboards (Axios, Keyboard.io, etc.) – or the Maltron/Kinesis Advantage – can be great options for some people, but they definitely take more time and effort to learn.
All the best luck. Stay safe out there.
