I learned dvorak. After doing this for ~2y, I'm much (twice?) faster in Dvorak than QWERTY presently, and am slightly faster than my old QWERTY typing speed.
I used to have wrist pain after particularly-long coding bouts. Then I decided to type like you play piano - hands up, wrists straight, move arms rather than wrists to punch keys in other locations.
No pain again. Ever. Only later did I find out that it's the recommended wrist posture. I still cringe a bit when I see people buying keyboards with wrist-rests (and using them), especially "ergonomic" ones - why improve one ergonomic point while intentionally worsening another?
Hah! For years when I played the piano, I held my hands like I now type; relatively flat fingered and straight wristed. It never affected my ability to play anything complicated and the only real problem was that my piano teacher insisted that this was not the 'correct' way to hold my hands while playing. Never suffered from RSI during the many many hours I've spent at either type of keyboard.
Whenever I try that position, I quickly feel muscle fatigue in my arms from having them suspended in the air for an extended period of time. I think that is why most people don't type in that position mostly.
I might be doing it wrong somehow, but how do you deal with arm fatigue?
A good part of it might be that my upper-arms are essentially straight down, so it's just biceps. Holding your arms out / forward will tire you out, and it's pretty easy to do that in a lot of desks / setups, especially if they're too high. That, and I tend to move around and/or stop and think a lot. In part because I should, in part because otherwise I get stiff. That tendency to not sit still for long has helped in a lot of other ways too, though it makes me hate long drives :|
You might be sitting too low, and holding your arms up with your shoulders rather than at your elbows. Keeping your shoulders back seems to help too, another of those things that everyone should be doing but few (myself included, the vast majority of the time) actually do.
I know what you mean about the stroke patient thing.
I had (still have, actually) RSI-ish problems in my right wrist but not my left, so I started mousing with my left hand and it felt exactly the same. Years later, my day-to-day productivity has fully recovered, but I still can't play mouse-intensive games like Minesweeper without getting confused and clicking the air with my right hand when I meant to use my left.
To help with RSI from the mouse, I got a trackball. It lets me keep my hand at a comfortable position and just roll my thumb ever so slightly to move around. My wrist never needs to touch the desk, so carpal tunnel is mitigated.
You might just be ambidextrous with a strong right hand. My strong hand is the left, but besides more complex things like writing I can also do pretty much everything with my right hand without having to train.
I use Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for years and do not suffer from RSI.
Another thing that probably helps is that I use table with enough depth, so between my monitors and edge of my table there is enough depth to not only fit my keyboard, but also extra ~15 centimeters space for my arms.
I switched to that keyboard after I was bothered with RSI. A few years later I started using my laptop a lot more, making it impractical to lug the keyboard everywhere, but I found that the Natural had forced me to improve my posture in general, keeping myarms at 90 degrees from each other with wrists straight.
Now I can type without pain on any keyboard, which is a relief since after using a Thinkpad the mushy key response of the Natural drives me nuts.
i'm going to try dvorak out. i started experiencing rsi symptoms last year and decided to switch my mouse hand to my left hand. it took almost 6 + months to train my hand to have the precise motion i had with my right (even when using adobe design products) . one year later, i have very little pain, if any. though, after reading this article, i'm now curious to try the dvorak layout.
also, i love my apple keyboard and was worried about using something else, as i use them on all my machines, including linux boxes. did some research and found this:
Second vote for Colemak here! I spent the first two of my high school years in Japan essentially being homeschooled. I had developed shoulder pain and a ganglion cyst in my wrist due to lots of typing and playing tennis, so I took the opportunity to try both Dvorak and Colemak.
I used to average 110 wpm on Qwerty. I started at 30 wpm Colemak and reached 80 in three months. After fourish years, I'm back at 110 wpm, with no more cyst or shoulder pain.
I tried Dvorak for a week but disliked that 1) it emphasizes hand alternation (as opposed to Colemak's emphasis on finger mashes) and 2) it was so difficult to type "ls -l".
I haven't actually tried an alternate keyboard layout yet so I can't vouch for it, but Colemak seems to have the edge on Dvorak.
I also do the ls -l thing all the time and finally succumbed to just uncommenting the relevant alias in my .bash_rc. 'll' just makes it easier; I don't know why I resisted enabling the alias...
It worked.
I'm fast at Dvorak after 4 years (90 wpm), but not as fast as I was with Qwerty (120 wpm).
Dvorak has a pleasant "rolling" finger feel and my wrists never ache, so I've kept it.
What fascinated me about learning Dvorak was that I felt like a stroke patient. Suddenly, I could not do something I had been able to do for years.
It made me consider the cost of a keystroke.
Great experience.