Discussion on: How do you fight joint pain in your hands and wrists?

[JoelBonetR 🥇]

Mechanical keyboards usually have a high profile which is the opposite you need to avoid wrist pain. You need to reduce the movement to the minimum possible including the keydown-keyup movement which involves the wrist tendons so the most important could be getting a low-profile keyboard such a logitech G815 or G915 or similar which are also kinda comfortable, then add a wrist rest of your choice

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

It's actually possible to find rather good 'mechanical' low profile keyboards as well, they're just not as common as the full-height ones.

And as far as overall travel, that's part of why i'm recommending good keyswitches. Good mechanical or optical ones trip just past the pre-travel, not somewhere beyond that, so with some practice it's possible to reduce overall travel even further on a good mechanical keyboard than you could on much cheaper options that don't have good tactile feedback.

[JoelBonetR 🥇]

That's quite opinionated and we both know that a mechanical keyboard rarely will be as low key travel as a low-profile one assuming you tried good examples on both sides. You can get almost the same performance on a good low profile mechanical, that's right but is less preferred due to the unnecessary extra-noise.

I'm with 12 guys more in the same office, if all of us have mechanical keyboards this could be a mess, the luck is all of us are seniors and only one prefere mechanical keyboard and it's not at my side 😂

And tactile feedback is something kinda weird as you are seeing what are you typing on the monitor/s, with the extra annotation that we are heavy users of the intellisense

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

That's quite opinionated and we both know that a mechanical keyboard rarely will be as low key travel as a low-profile one assuming you tried good examples on both sides.

Lower total travel yes, but good low-profile mechanical options will usually require less travel to trip the keyswitch than many monoblock designs do, so it's possible with some practice to reduce the total travel on each keystroke to a greater degree with a mechanical keyboard than a monoblock design.

less preferred due to the unnecessary extra-noise.

Not all mechanical keyboards are inherently noisy, it's just that most people who are really enthusiastic about them prefer the noisier keyswitches like Gateron Blues.

And tactile feedback is something kinda weird as you are seeing what are you typing on the monitor/s

The tactile feedback has no delay, visual feedback has to contend with the input latency and other factors. IOW, you get tactile feedback faster than you do visual when typing. On top of that though, most people can react faster to tactile feedback than visual feedback because the tactile feedback is a much simpler stimulus.

[JoelBonetR 🥇]

I must remember you that we are discussing about which is better to avoid wrist pain, on which case a low profile slim keyboard is the king, other things are associated to user preferences who are not applicable to everyone and which we can discuss on another side or on a specific thread.

Just to clarify your last point, tactile feedback means you are aware you pulsate a key, visual feedback tells you if you pulsated the correct or the wrong one. You'll, of course have tactile feedback even with no keys, like in your smartphone for example, every time you touch the screen you know you put your finger over a place where a key should be because you trained your memory this way. Try to switch from english qwerty layout into something highly similar but not same like Spanish qwerty. It only adds one key while others remain mostly the same, you'll feel some kind of frustration till you get used to.

[Austin S. Hemmelgarn]

By tactile feedback I'm not talking about the feel of touching a key, I'm talking about the feedback that the keyswitch has engaged. Many monoblock keyboards don't give this kind of feedback at all, or they give very limited feedback (usually the resistance of the key to being depressed further changes, but often not enough that most people notice). I'm not saying it matters for typing correctly (although it kind of does, because it tells you that the key itself engaged and most people don't hop between keyboard layouts (and those who do typically know all the keyboard layouts they use)), but for minimizing overall force applied to a key (you can release the key the moment you get that feedback that the switch has engaged, instead of having to make it bottom out or having to guess where the switch trips just to ensure the keystroke is entered).

[Avalander]

When it comes to wrist pain, there is no one size fits all solution, it depends on each individual and a specialist should be consulted in severe or prevalent cases.

Than being said, mechanical keyboards do help in some cases. As Austin says, the advantage of mechanical keyboards is that the key press is detected somewhere halfway the travelling distance of the key, with correspondent tactile feedback, so you don't have to press the key to the bottom, as opposed to how many monoblock keyboards work. This is important because pressing the key until the bottom generates a sudden back-pressure that strains the tendons. With a good mechanical keyboard you can just stop pressing once you get the tactile feedback, when the key still has some travelling distance left, which reduces considerably that back-pressure.

[JoelBonetR 🥇]

it's not about the tactile feedback, it's about the wrists position you need to achieve to use a keyboard.

Using a low-profile one (mechanical or not) lets you use it on a more natural way (raising less your hands respectively to the wrists). Also releasing a key without that "key bounce" is an extra effort so there's no magic combination to win unless you reduce all the movements to the minimum possible, that is low profile and slim (TKL) keyboard, then get it mechanical or not, this doesn't matter that much.

I use a mechanical one everyday as I said (Logitech G915) which is mechanical with tactile switches and I love it the most. I have wrist pain too since years ago due to a chronic illness and I tried several keyboard types, the G915 was my first low-profile and the one that lets me code for 14h a day if needed without issues.