If your primary job, hobby, or both involves typing, you need an ergonomic keyboard. Period.
Traditional keyboards were not designed with humane ergonomics in mind. They were designed around the technical constraints of 19th century typewriters, and then that layout was ported forward and forward until we've now ended up with a miniature version of it on our damn smartphones. There are many inherent design flaws in the traditional keyboard, but here are a few:
- keys are all arranged into one single central group and designed to be typed on in a vertical fashion, instead of the keyboard being split into two halves and rotated outward to meet the user's arms naturally, leading to typists' wrists being crammed together and oriented straight up and down, which causes ulnar deviation;
- keys are also row-staggered, forcing your fingers to travel along strange diagonal paths alien to how your fingers naturally extend when curling and uncurling them, instead of keys being arranged in columns so that your fingers only need to move in straight lines, or even columns that naturally splay out from where your palms are, in keeping with the most relaxed angle of finger extension;
- keys along the left and right edges are extended to make them slightly easier to reach, but otherwise the keyboard makes absolutely no accommodations for the natural variations in length and dexterity of human fingers, such as making keys at the top of the keyboard that may be hard to reach taller, or using an (entirely non-existent in traditional keyboards) columnar layout to stagger the columns according to relative finger length;
- instead of using the thumb, which is the strongest finger on the human hand, and the one that is used to holding things down for long periods of time, for things like control, alt, and shift, that burden is instead placed on the weakest finger on the human hand, and the one that is most likely to cause nerve issues (due to its connection with the carpal tunnel), the pinky;
- most modern keyboards require you to press keys all the way, slamming your fingers into the backboard over and over, instead of registering about halfway through the key's travel.
If you spend hours a day, almost every day, furiously using a device that was fundamentally not designed for ergonomic human interaction, with your most complex and fragile appendages, it is only a matter of when, not if, you will run into physical problems. A lot of us writers, programmers, and others that spend all their time in cyberspace or imaginary space all day tend to forget this, but we're physical human beings too (unfortunately). We have bodies and, even if we have it easy compared to, say, construction workers, those bodies are subject to physical wear and tear of our day to day jobs (or hobbies), just like everyone else. In this case, that wear and tear is predominantly centered around our human-computer interface system, broadly conceived: the mouse, keyboard, chair, desk, monitor. Desk and monitor ergonomics can do a lot for your back and neck, and mouse ergonomics can help a little with one wrist, but paying attention to all of that and completely ignoring one of your main human-computer interface devices, the keyboard, is like leaving a giant sinkhole in the middle of your otherwise sparkling-clean living room.
At first the problems you eventually do run into with your wrists and fingers as a result of keyboarding all day will seem minor – sure you've got a little pain, aching, numbness, or tingling but the pain quickly goes away and you can get back to work, right? But this doesn't last. Maybe it will for a year, five years, even ten, but don't you want to be able to do the work or hobbies you love much longer than that, maybe even your whole life? You can't get away with ignoring your body forever, and that damage, that strain, that wear and tear, those warning signs – they add up over time.
If you don't treat the root cause of the symptoms, the carpal tunnel and tendonitis will begin to become chronic, an ever tightening vicious cycle of irritation and pain that leads to more irritation and eventually outright damage, and eventually you'll be faced with full-on repetitive strain injury, which does not heal. Once you have RSI, short of getting a surgery that costs tens of thousands of dollars and isn't guaranteed to do anything for you at all, your body can't heal it. The damage is too minute and fine-grained for it to deal with. So you'll just have to accept that crippling pain and numbness and weakness for the rest of your life at that point.
This means that you really can't approach this problem with a cavalier "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it" attitude. Sure you might be one of the, say, 30% of people who are lucky, whose bodies are just somehow so resilient and flexible, or whose psychology just naturally makes it easy (or even effortless) to regularly take breaks, but once you've gotten to the bridge, it's far too late to actually deal with it then, so why take risks? Why not use a little prophylaxis?
Preserve your body now, so that you can enjoy having it in your old age.
How do you go about preserving your body, though? Breaks that are only long enough to treat the symptoms – stopping for a second to take a breather, stretching your wrists, cracking your knuckles, and so on – don't actually deal with the underlying wear and tear that your body is warning you about. The only way to actually deal with those issues properly is to consistently take pretty long breaks, something on the order of thirty minutes to an hour, regularly, and that's difficult to keep up with any consistency: obviously, it's easy to forget to do it, even in response to pain symptoms, or constantly give excuses to never do it, and timer based approaches to solving that won't work well for many jobs that involve a lot of keyboarding, such as programming or writing, which tend to also involve a flow state that's extremely important to maintain. Moreover it's well known at this point that willpower-based approaches to habits and routines and things you need to do simply don't work very well.
This is why, in my opinion, everyone that primarily works with a keyboard needs to spend some time picking out an ergonomic (preferably mechanical) keyboard that works for them. The properties you want to look for are:
- Split, rotated layout, so that your wrists can be straight in line with your arms;
- Column-staggered keys, preferably with splay;
- Tenting capabilities if possible;
- Mechanical keys, to avoid having to slam your fingers into the back of the keyboard.
- Key sizes that have been adjusted to account for finger length and key position.