Congrats on finding and resolving your carpal tunnel problem. I switched to a basic wireless trackball[1] about 5 years into my career (10 years in industry) which has kept me mostly pain free since I can avoid moving my wrist.
Still might need to look for a better keyboard and a slightly better trackball, but for anyone reading this with minor pain: don't ignore it. Try new things early and try to reduce your pain, even minor twinges as much as possible early, since, well, I expect to be in this game for the long haul.
Thanks, good luck to you on finding a completely pain-free solution!
This is the late 90s, so neurologists and other doctors weren't very useful at all. One even suggested surgery to correct my problem which got me really scared I might be out of the profession and wondering what I could do.
What I found out was that there's a nerve that runs all the way down your arm into your hand/wrist, and when I twisted my right hand outward to use the mouse, it was pinching this nerve constantly. But instead of having pain in my wrist or forearms, it was causing pain in my neck and shoulders. This is a well-known phenomenon called "referred pain" where the body might not have the proper pain receptors to show pain in one area, so it sends the pain signals elsewhere.
I started to wonder why I could write notes with a pen for hours and hours throughout college and never had any issues, but a couple of years out of college, I had such debilitating pain that I almost had to quit. So I bought a mouse that had the form factor of a pen and tried to recreate my experience writing by moving my keyboard away and using the pen mouse the way I would when I write with a pen. It was a very primitive mouse with a roller ball the size of a marble at the tip, but it completely worked. After the pen mouse died in 9 months, I tried to recreate my wrist angle in a similar way as the pen mouse with a normal mouse and it worked as well. As I said, I've adopted this convention and people comment on how weirdly I hold the mouse, but I've been pain free ever since.
I'm not endorsing the one above, just showing what it looks like. The one I had from the late 90s was wired, with a big roller at the tip instead of it being optical.
The main thing is that when you hold a pen, your hand is more up and down rather than flat to the surface of the table, like when you're holding a mouse. Having it up and down is a more natural position for the hand relative to your body and doesn't force it to be twisted away from the body so that I could hold the mouse. That twist was was pinched my nerve for me.
Man I love it, and my battery lasts weeks! Sorry to hear yours doesn’t. And yeah, I wish it had Linux drivers. I thought I found some software somewhere that allowed this (I don’t really use Linux as a desktop, just terminals). Maybe I’ll try and find it and put a link here.
Yeah, mine lasts 4-6 weeks, but with the Logitech M570 trackball I was getting 6-12 months off of a single AA battery.
The M570 also has a red led that lights up when you need to replace the battery. The ergo doesn't have any such led, so the only sign that you need to recharge it is when it dies.
There are some "drivers" for it but I haven't had much luck with them. What I did find was someone had some scripts I was able to use to get things usable on a 4k monitor: https://gitlab.com/khaytsus/mxergo
My issue is that I use a scaled 4k monitor, and in order to get the mouse to move at a reasonable speed I had to put some xinput commands into my autostart script. It feels hacky, and just wish it had proper support.
I use two 4K monitors. Haven't really had an issue with movement speed. I can pretty easily send the pointer from one side all the way too the other with one flick of my thumb. I use sway/wayland though, so maybe it's different from X11 on that. I also mostly use the keyboard for desktop navigation, coding, etc. The mouse is almost entirely for clicking on things within a browser window and the occasional Steam game.
Been using M570 too for some time. However recently I've read that some research suggests that thumb-operated trackballs might do bad things to your thumb and that finger-operated trackballs (like Kensington Expert) are less risky. Worth keeping in mind and digging deeper. (Don't have K.E. but planning to try it out)
> Thumb-operated trackballs don’t work for everyone. “Overuse of the thumb can result in de Quervain’s tenosynovitis, where extending the thumb becomes a painful movement,
Still might need to look for a better keyboard and a slightly better trackball, but for anyone reading this with minor pain: don't ignore it. Try new things early and try to reduce your pain, even minor twinges as much as possible early, since, well, I expect to be in this game for the long haul.
[1] Logitech M570