Comment by justinc8687

4 days ago

Once their finger movement has been restored, I'd look into various large-split keyboards. The Kinesis Freestyle2 USB version has a large split (20") option that could help. They have screw hole mounts on the bottom which you could likely jerry-rig with a sling to put the keyboard in the proper position. I used it with a custom 3d-printed mount so that I could attach it to the arms of my chair.

The wireless version has less of a gap, but you could always just get two of them and use the left half of one and the right half of another.

Feel free to reach out to me at justin (at) justin-c (dot) com, if you want to talk. I spent about 5 years working on custom mounting options for keyboards after getting a severe RSI, ultimately proven to be partially caused by a rheumatic condition.

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justinc8687

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justinc8687  4 days ago

Another thing worth mentioning, if they are a coder, is that this is one of the places where some of the LLM tools can really shine. Many people provide a rough spec, then either (shutter) vibe-code or edit substantially once it produces it.

Having a RSI myself, I find that I can provide very detailed instructions in regular english, for which voice dictation works quite well to Cursor (but any others should work too), then it will produce code that I have to edit very little. For most people this wouldn't be an efficient flow, but it greatly helps me reduce typing, thus is beneficial to me.

With something like that, I believe you could do well pecking around with one hand for edits without needing to do much typing.

On Mac, Karabiner-Elements is incredibly useful to remap things, such that you can enable things like mousekeys or otherwise that would keep from having to move (either) hand very much. It's also a way to do as others have shown on this post and do a mirror layout or add something analogous to layers without having to buy new keyboards.