I've known a couple with carpal tunnel syndrome. But even if you exclude that, just about every programmer I know over the age of 25 has had some kind of wrist or hand pain at some point. Probably due to the amount of typing and mousing involved. (I fully predict the rebuttal to be that these people are doing it wrong.)

In most cases there seems to be no long-term damage, and the injuries in question are probably not terribly serious. It's just harder to rest one wrists or fingers than it is (say) one's knee, ankle or shoulder.

I developed a horrible pain in my right wrist at the age of 20, during my first software development internship. Any motion I made with the mouse was torture. I had to start using the mouse with my left hand to do work at all.

The pain is gone now, but I take ergonomics quite a bit more seriously. I'm considering getting a split keyboard, although it breaks my heart to have to get rid of my clicky das.

It's expensive at $300, but the Kinesis Advantage is split and fairly clicky.

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

I have one and love it. You have to be willing to invest time in it though: it took me 2 weeks to get up to full speed, plus I spent a bunch of time remapping the thumb keys to my liking.

I got a Kinesis about a year ago after developing wrist pain, and second the recommendation. It took me a full month to get back up to speed on it but now my wrist pain is gone. The keys feel nice too. My only complaint is that it makes it difficult to type one-handed while I'm eating, but I really shouldn't be eating at the computer anyway. :)

Something else I tried was putting my mouse on a slant away from the keyboard so that the radius and ulna were not as pronated. This helped, but my mouse kept sliding off the incline. Ideally I'd like something at an angle in between a standard horizontal mouse and the vertical ones like the Evoluent. It seems there are a few new models on Amazon since I looked last--may have to try one. My pain is more in the arm than the wrist, so fine wrist motion is more important than being completely vertical. At some point it may just make sense to 3D print a mouse of the appropriate shape...

For me, mousing has been consistently and terribly painful. I bought a right-handed Evoluent mouse (I am right handed) and it worked wonders, until a period of particularly intense mousing, at which point I bought a left-handed model.

Now, I primarily use the left-handed Evoluent mouse. During periods of intense mousing, if I start to feel pain, I'll switch to the right-handed Evoluent mouse for a week or two.

You mentioned wanting a mouse which put your hand at an angle in between a standard mouse (horizontal) and the Evoluent mouse (vertical). Is there a particular reason for this?

I ask because I've found the Evoluent to be incredibly comfortable. Besides which, a vertical orientation most closely emulates the position your hands would be in when you are anatomically at rest (standing, with your hands hanging down at your sides).

As much as I love the Evoluent mouse, I still feel that eliminating mousing from my computer use is the Right Way to address mouse related pain. Treat the root cause, not the symptoms, as they say.

I basically use keyboard shortcuts for everything. The two parts of using a computer which I found most difficult to control with a keyboard were web browsing and window resizing / management.

For web browsing I stumbled upon Chrome + the Vimium extension. It has non-chording key bindings for switching tabs, moving around on the page, following links, copying (yanking) text, etc. Basically, Vimium adds Vim-like keybindings to many common browser tasks. Find it here: http://vimium.github.com/

For window resizing and management, I use Moom (it's a Mac application). It is fantastic. You can setup key bindings to resize a window to a preset dimension, among other things; but that's what I use it for primarily. I have 3 key bindings that I use all the time: 1) full screen, 2) two thirds on the left side of the screen, and 3) one third on the right hand side of the screen. Moom is here: http://manytricks.com/moom/

I've also become aware of Slate for window management on the Mac, which looks amazing, but is a tool of the large investment / large payoff sort, and I just haven't had much free time lately. Slate is here: https://github.com/jigish/slate

The Humanscale switch mouse works well for a hybrid vertical / standard mouse.

http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=...

I use one daily and really like it, although its made of cheap plastic. The $99 list price is pushing it, you can probably find one on ebay for ~$30. I got mine for free at the Humanscale showroom when I went to look at their chairs.

Maybe you are right. When I was 20 or so, I also used the computer a lot, not so much for programming yet, but for this and this. So I did use the mouse much more than I do now. However from time to time I felt issues with my hands.

So I even bought this heavy Logitech Natural Keyboard, I think things improved a lot. Anyway, from time to time I still had minor issues.

Being 28 now, working since some years fulltime as developer with normal keyboards, I hardly have such issues anymore. Although I have to admit that I pay attention that I get up from time to time. But I am definitely no ergonomics ideal. Half of the time I sit like depicted on the picture on the OP's link and in the evenings even worse when I hack at home on my laptop.

When I was working as a Japanese to English translator, I started getting carpal. Switching to Dvorak keyboard solved the problem, with the added bonus that I could type 10 WPM faster after six months of getting used to it.

I am in my early 20s but I already get wrist and elbow pain from mice. Trackball is better, but still causes pain. The keyboard has never been an issue. My workstation is now 100% keyboard controllable. Vimperator and XMonad were key to this transition. Now I just have back problems.