Suggestion, don't use your pinky. I haven't used it for over a decade. Instead, move your whole arm as a unit, and primarily use your index finger. It takes some adaptation, but movement is better than stillness the vast majority of times.
As for the tendinitis, have you tried physical therapy for your fingers? Whenever I've had a stupid day of overusing the thumb with my phone, I wrap the smallest possible elastic band around my thumb, and do some curls. Slow and controlled. The mixture of force, movement and stretching feels great, and the issue is gone.
I have a pair of Freestyle2 keyboards, both are over a decade old. I strongly recommend the V3 tenting kit. You can get a refurb USB Freestyle2 with the V3 kit for $70 direct from Kinesis.
Good coincidence, yesterday I switched to a split keyboard. I had been programming since 2011.
Main reason for my switch is that I felt that my shoulders have a wider stance than before. I don't know if it's because of an improvement in fitness (I do a lot of shoulder and back work), or maybe with age I lost a bit of shoulder internal rotation mobility.
Either way, the learning curve was like a few minutes for me. Guess it's a perk of experience and the habit of touch typing.
Yes. I'd swear that people that unfortunately fall into RSI also fall into a negative cycle of moving less and favoring a static position at all levels - fingers, wrists, shoulders.
Our bodies love movement and it's often a recipe for solving all sorts of issues.
Hopefully with the advent of AI coding, OSS frontends for all sorts of commercial backends will be more frequent, have higher quality, and consumers would be able to vote with their wallets for high-quality APIs enabling said frontends.
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