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
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.
examples I've heard of: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice/mx-vertical-erg...
https://ergonomictrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/pen-m...
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.
I got the ergo one[1] and my wrist pain went away, the key is that now I don't move my wrist anymore.
[1] https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/mice/mx-ergo-wireles...
I might need to try either getting the one you linked or perhaps 3D printing a stand to tilt my existing mouse out and experiment.
I love the tilt, and the improved build quality.
But I wish it had better battery life, was a size bigger, and had Linux drivers.
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
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-trackballs/a... > "Should you switch to a trackball?"
I noticed that very early on in my career. Back when keyboards you could reasonably buy always had a keypad at the right of the keyboard.
So what did I do back then? (we're talking early 2000 or so)...
I learned to use my mouse as a leftie.
And to this day I can use my mouse either with the left hand or right hand.
Also I made sure to configure everything so that mouse usage is minimized.
This is also a general recommendation for gamers looking to improve their accuracy with FPS style games. Low DPI, larger arm movements provides higher accuracy.
The solution was to switch my mouse to the left side, where it could be slightly closer to my body. It took a few months of getting used to, but after 10-20 years (can't remember), I've never had pain on my left arm. I have tried going back to right side a few times, just out of curiosity, and the pain on the right arm will come back after a few months.
A concerted programme of golfer's elbow exercises and creating a split keyboard as described have dealt with the pain.
I am now using a Slimblade trackball and not getting on with it: it causes different pain and 3 months in I am still not accurate.
I would also review desk/chair height and other major elements of the setup too. Pain in the extremities can have causation near the hips, back or shoulders so increasingly I favor looking for holistic solutions. Lately I have been doing animal crawl exercises(bear, lizard, crab) and have found that they clear up a lot of minor aches-and-pains issues, so that might be another thing to try.
This has been my experience too. I used to have a TKL keyboard, thought I needed a numpad even though the only times I would've had use for it have been Blender and a GTA V plane flying mission.
Now I've gone down the rabbit hole of split keyboards and ergonomic mice when all I really need is a TKL keyboard. ZSA Moonlander is dope, but it doesn't help the mouse situation.
It took a few weeks to operate the mouse well with left hand, but now I'm fairly ok with left handed usage. Still using right hand mouse for high precision gestures and when I need left hand on keyboard (when using Tab). Unfortunately the choice for left handed mice is very low and they're expensive;I use a symmetrical Kensington trackball with the left hand.
almost every mouse/keyboard combo has the mousepad on the side which I dislike
But, they stopped producing that particular kind (they were also hard to maintain using a special key to open the case) so I just switched to using my left hand for the mouse on half my computers and right hand on the other half. That was easier than moving equipment around from machine to machine for me and coworkers/family. No RSI since.
It's the mouse that killed me. A handful of years after graduating from college, I thought my programming career was over because the pain in my neck and shoulders was so bad I couldn't type. I went to a bunch of doctors, neurologists, physiotherapy, etc but nothing helped, not even medication.
It turns out twisting my right hand outward in order to accommodate my mouse to the right of my keyboard was the culprit. I changed my entire set up so that my mouse is away from my keyboard when I type, and when I need to use the mouse, I push my keyboard away and have the mouse on the table in the center of my body, with my wrist slightly twisted so that it mimics writing with a pencil. That's also why Macbooks and similar laptops are fine with my because it's in the middle.
Once I switched to this technique, my carpal tunnel went away. It's been over 25 years now with no pain. Like I said, different people probably have different causes of carpal tunnel, but for me this was the precise reason.