When my nerves started acting up because my job forces me to use the same key combination a lot I built myself a 'mouse board'. I slaughtered a cheap computer mouse, transferred the buttons to a footrest made of plywood, reassigned some keys with X-mouse and could now survive hours of doing mouse clicks and 'Ctrl + C' by doing them with my feet!

While the commercial model has stupidly heavy foot pedals my version works on a toe tap. It's almost like dancing.

I have experienced a traumatic injury of a wrist that results in chronic pain, so I had to build a similar setup for myself to continue working.

More than that - if you work as a dev for a company, you are likely to use a company-provided laptop, which is often a Mac - so I use Aerospace instead of sway/i3 and configure everything in Nix.

I also use an ergosplit kbd - this is what prevents me from being in pain all the time.

Never heard of Kmonad.

I've been using keyd which seems to be the same at first glance.

Maybe I'll check Kmonad out at some point when I'm not feeling too lazy.

Good advice. I splashed out on the kinesis advantage. A two week holiday and switching to the ergo keyboard cured my tennis elbow. It's very expensive and took a long time to get used to but I wouldn't go back.

I also installed Tridactyl Firefox extension for vim bindings. I don't use it often but it is handy when you are coding in vim and need to keep switching to a browser to read documentation.

Edit: The annoying thing about the kinesis is that it only comes in US layout. So when I use it as a UK device I have to do some funny business to get a backslash.

This is a great and very informative write-up! I really appreciate it. I don't currently have a functioning computer due to the poverty that comes with disabilities and all that, but I hope that if I ever do, I remember your post! I have it bookmarked now. I'll also be sharing it with a friend who may find it useful. Thank you for sharing this with us! :)