I had rsi as well, so bad I couldn't shake anyone's hand. I thought my wrist was broken. What fixed it for me was to drop the keyboard down onto my lap using a laptop desk, or "lapdesk." I believe my pain was from resting my wrists or forearms on the desk or chair armrests...So I also removed the chair armrests. Also, removing the distance from keyboard to mouse by utilizing a tablet keyboard w/o a numeric keypad. Using the i3 window manager in Linux was great, and I need to do better at using vimium in the browser to reduce mouse usage. It took me forever to find the lapdesk thing out, and there is research behind the ergonomics: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/ergoguide.html

http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/AHTutorials/typingposture.html

In my opionion, it's worth a good read-through.