I recently got a Dierya 65% keyboard, and think it is rather thick.
Is this normal for a mechanical keyboard? Or is the Dierya exceptional high? Do you use a wrist rest? If so, is there anything special to look out for? Or will any wrist rest do?
I enjoy a bit smaller boards. 60% is the sweet spot for me.
For me using wrist rests with small boards feels very counter intuitive as it kinda negates the benefits of smaller footprint.
My keyboards also do not have angle. Why would you have an angle and then add something to kinda mitigate it a bit?
Since getting a vertical mouse and using only 0% board with proper ergonomics (desk height, screen height, chair height etc. ) I have had zero wrist pain.
I just wish there were more options for 0 / negative adjustable boards. Currently the options are mostly self soldered pcb or some rare gb-boards.
Physiotherapists tend to recommend against wrist rests. When you are typing your hands should hover, when you aren’t then your hands should ideally move away from the keyboard altogether.
If you still use one anyway, rigid ones are less likely to compress veins/nerves in your wrist/hand and are more comfortable than they sound. Make sure you only rest your palm on it (and only when not typing), it’s not actually a “wrist” rest (also you’ll find better options searching for “palm rest” IME).
I am not a physio, this is all parroted from two physios I’ve talked to about wrist pain.
Can understand the hoovering, to keep your hands free to move where needed. Thanks for the recommendation! Together with the idea to start with a piece of wood, I have now some options to try :)
I do, I find the wooden one to be the most comfortable one, but haven’t found a wood one since I started using a split board, so I 3d printed one… But ran out of resin midway through, then I realized resin is not great to have in contact with the skin so I painted it… Then I realized that sweaty palms might end up removing the paint and I also wasn’t sure that the paint was good for skin contact, so I glued some rubber feet on top… I still don’t fully trust it so I put some paper napkins on top… Yeah, I should really try to find some wooden split wrist rests…
Sound I could make something my self from a piece of wood! Sand it smooth.
Good way to test the benefit of wrist rest.
According to a blog post my Keeb.io:
Floating is probably the one to retire. Forearm support is your wrist’s best friend. Wrist support is your shoulder’s best friend.
The post is citing a small study of only 13 participants, but I think it’s way more of value than any personal opinion from some random dude on the Internet (which includes me as well).
With that said. I’m a wrist rest person my self. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer, probably too much time at times. And I have used wrist rest exclusively for more than a decade with various mechanical keyboards.
I’m the person who uses a highly keyboard driven environment that mostly consist of text-based software. I don’t use the mouse a lot, so I always rest my hands on the keyboard with the fingers on the home row (asdfjkl;).
This works for me, but you should listen to your body and what it’s telling you. According to the article it doesn’t seem to exist some one good thing that works for everyone. Which is probably true for most things.
However. Stay away from those tilted keyboards. They’re rather popular because aesthetics. Which is stupid. Your keyboard should preferable have a negative tilt, or at least have no tilt at all.
