Argh-onomics!

[eekee]

Argh! Ergonomics! I have, evidently, had a huge problem in this department. It wouldn't have been be such a problem if not for an entirely separate mental health problem. When making choices, my brain sometimes gets into an infinite loop which feels very stressful and doesn't go away even when I make a decision. (It's massively parallel; it has considerable resources to devote to pure distilled wheelspinning.) Typing at a desk that's too high obviously does something to my shoulders and neck, but whatever it is, the resulting stressed feeling is almost indistinguishable from the stress I get when decision-making goes wrong.

I was all right just after moving home, when all I had was a folding chair and a laptop. This was when I posted my screenshot, and I wrote up a lot of plans and partition table code besides that. It wasn't a long-term solution; I started to get pain in my neck after a few weeks, but at least the pain had a clear cause. Then I got my desk and desktop back, and found myself getting into a state after only a few minutes typing. Changing the keyboard pushed that up to maybe half an hour, but that's still much too short a time for me to really get anything done. I lowered the desk but it would only go 3cm down; it's still 8cm higher than I'd like.

All this was a lot easier before I put on so much weight. I think part of the issue is that I either have to bend my wrists at a crazy angle if the keyboard is close, (I don't do that,) or stretch too far to reach it. I have an adjustable keyboard but it's far too thick to use without wrist rests but the wrist rests themselves are big problems. They add a minimum of 3cm height over the desk and they're so deep that I can't get the keyboard close enough even with it spread to its maximum width.

I just rediscovered I have AutoHotKey installed and a configuration file for 1-handed typing. It's quite simple: the space bar becomes a modifier which mirrors the layout of most of the keyboard. So I tried it but I evidently need a chair with armrests and some practice too.

So I've answered the rhetorical question I posted with my screenshot: "Why haven't I done this before?" lol