I have problems with my left hand for a while now. Years of bad
habits, and lack of vision. Today I control my environment exclusively
with the left hand. Emacs with the pinky (Control
on Caps Lock) and my window manager with the thumb
(Win/Super_L). This works wonders for my productivity but it
puts too much stress on the hand. It started to show in the recent
months. Before making some drastic changes (such as switching
to Dvorak) I did a lot of small changes and tried a few
different things.
Quite a few people recommend to switch Alt_L with
Ctrl_L. That works for me too, and it's not bad being that
thumb is the strongest finger while pinky the weakest. However I
choose to control awesome with Super_L and that puts
too much stress on the thumb it self (and then there is also the fear
of Carpal). Next step was to move Super_L to
AltGr. It that situation I control my whole environment with
both thumbs... I tried quite a few of these variations, going full
circle and returning to the original setup. This time around I read a
lot on the subject
of RSI
and found some good
documents. Wrists
by JWZ is a good start and provides many references. I decided
to start with the very basics.
There's no point in using Dvorak if I'm sitting at my desk like a
hunchback 10 hours a day. This is where the real problem lies. I need
to maintain proper posture, good working conditions, and the reason
for this article; regular wrist breaks. This is
where Xwrits comes in, it's
a great utility that will remind you (and even force you) to take
wrist breaks - which also suggests real breaks; a stroll around the
garden, having a snack, or doing
some stretches.
One of the tricks Xwrits uses is window flashes, different
colors should annoy you and maybe force you to take a break when you
decide to ignore it. However that only made me kill the window
ASAP. There is also the fact that the bitmaps used are old and ugly as
hell. Fortunately you can define your own images. I wanted something
calmer, and obviously better looking. I managed to find a nice set of
hand gesture cliparts over on "Lord
of Design" and used them to
create a
set for Xwrits. Additional signs suit me well, and I placed them
in the bottom right corner as the (break)clock is by default in the
upper left. I start it from "~/.xinitrc" with:
# Xwrits reminds you to take wrist breaks and avoid RSI
/usr/bin/xwrits typetime=40 clock breakclock top \
ready-picture=$HOME/.xwrits/ready.gif rest-picture=$HOME/.xwrits/rest.gif warning-picture=$HOME/.xwrits/warning.gif &