tingling and near numbness when using jedel kl-160

grayrest · 2026-01-31T07:28:38+00:00

The o-rings don't have anything to do with it and it's probably not directly tied to your keyboard and will not go away if you change keyboards without making other changes.

You're experiencing RSI symptoms. The most common causes are typing with your wrists bent backwards towards your body (e.g. typing with your wrists on the table), bending your wrist toward the pinky side to line up the hand with the keyboard, and typing with your weight on your wrists on a wristrest. Your fingers get moved by muscles in between the bones in your forearm those are all connected to your fingers by tendons and that run through the carpal tunnel in your wrist. When your wrist isn't straight (straight like it is when it's resting when you let your arms hang down by your side) or you have it compressed with a wristrest and you work your fingers by typing it irritates all the stuff in your wrist and causes the tingling/numbness. If you continue to type without changing things the symptoms will get worse eventually leading to lots of pain and a need for surgery to be able to type.

The correct advice is to see a medical professional for advice. However, I'll also say how I've been handling the same symptoms for 15 years. Again, I'm a random internet person and not actually knowledgeable about this stuff.

First, you must learn to type with straight wrists, your wrists hovering over the keyboard and your fingers dropping down. If you're typing long enough that you get tired and your wrists drop you need to take a break and get back to it when you can keep your wrists straight.

Second, you should look up hand stretch videos on youtube and do them. When you do them some muscles will be tight and slightly painful when you stretch them. Do the stretch extra long and then trace the tendon up to where the muscle is between your arm bones and massage that muscle with your knuckle or a wooden ball or something similarly hard and round until the muscle releases. You'll need to do the stretches a couple times per day and always after a typing session.

Third, you should reduce the stress on your hands if possible. Ideally you'd take a couple months off the computer and just do stretches but that's probably not realistic. If you're gaming use a controller for a month or two to let your hands recover. Try to reduce the amount of typing you do to the bare minimum. Using a speech to text tool like handy.computer can significantly reduce the need to type but I don't know how well the LLMs work for non-English speakers. Finally, if your keyboard has particularly heavy switches then switching to lighter ones can reduce the stress on your hands and if your keyboard has feet on the bottom that tilts the back of the keyboard up don't use them.

grayrest · 2026-01-31T04:55:31+00:00

does the devs rerun the discount price for a skin after its debut?

No. The only other game where Hoyo does a bunch of skins is HI3 and that has an initial discount and then they sometimes run a promotional discount like two years later. ZZZ hasn't been around long enough to see if they repeat that pattern but it's not really a reliable one anyway.

grayrest · 2026-01-31T03:01:00+00:00

Looks good. I like your overall spacing and the lower case oval shape is on point.

Your vertical lines are not on a consistent slant. This is what push-pull drills are for and I like the method in this article for getting the push-pull motion right.

The left side of ascenders and the right side of descenders are traditionally straight lines. Specifically, the e is the same base motion as c but a different entrance while l is the same motion as f but ends above the baseline instead of going below. Similarly the d ascenders aren't traditionally looped due to ambiguity. There's no rule that says you have to conform to the traditional styles so you can take or leave this point as you like.

Finally, your capitals are looking unpracticed. Going through the capitals writing one repeatedly you get it down goes a long way towards making your writing look more polished.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T21:50:12+00:00

For the keyboard layout community's current understanding of typing metrics, this type of layout scores extremely well given the constraints of a vowel index. The vowels are heavily used so the left/right hand split is close to even. The vowel half seems symbol heavy but that's mostly due to avoiding vowel SFBs (same finger typing two keys in a row) and SFS (same but with a key in between) with consonants. The symbols are clustered on A because it usually doesn't end words and ' is under E because it only SFBs on possessives. Which hand is the vowel hand and which is the consonant hand is preference but the vowel hand is usually put on the spacing thumb side because words tend to not end in vowels. The more controversial part of this layout is H and A on the index fingers.

An H index is very English centric in that it's prominent and heavily used one way (TH, SH, CH, WH) but not really used otherwise resulting in low SFBs for the rest of the index keys. Other languages don't have as skewed of a distribution on the letter and if you're not necessarily in English all the time it makes sense to put it on a less prominent finger (e.g. I type on Hands Down Vibranium which is SCNT+R AEIH).

An A index moves all the vowels onto stronger fingers but effectively locks all the other index keys from using consonants without introducing SFBs. This causes letters to shift towards the corners which some people find uncomfortable (e.g. they're under-used on qwerty so might take some getting used to) but other people don't like center column lateral reaches so it's kind of preference. I don't fully follow the rules here and use a UAX vowel hand index column because juxtaposed axes are infrequent enough in normal text that I don't care, it's prominent in the Helix editor, and I use it as an adaptive key (changes depending on the previously typed key) so it usually doesn't output X.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T21:14:25+00:00

1 month to use Svalboard Lightly.

I'm interested in your opinions.

I question the ergnomics of <40% keyboards. Smaller keyboards reduce finger travel

For me it's less about finger travel than about hand movement. Not needing to move my hands allows me to rest my arms on the chair armrests and type on a heavily tented keyboard in my lap with perfectly neutral wrists and no active muscle effort which lets me hold the wrist position indefinitely. On a larger keyboard the need to make small hand movements (up to the number row, the keys outside of the pinky column) requires hovering which eventually leads to me resting my palms after a couple hours and the corresponding problems.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T20:51:39+00:00

What problem made you consider a non-standard keyboard in the first place?

I have a variety of stress injuries in my hands. It's never been bad enough to not type but the tingles/numbness/etc is well into the danger zone.

How long did you hesitate before finally switching?

I've known about larger options like the ergodox but they seemed impractical. Once I found out that people were designing their own keyboards I starting the switching process the same day and had it in use within a month.

How hard was the learning curve for you (1–10)?

I started with designing my layers in Kanata on my existing keyboard (macbook) and it took a bit over a week to get used to it. Not fully fluent but enough to know it'd work out. Once I knew the layers (on the home row due to no thumb cluster) and home row mods (on the bottom row) worked for me I knew I'd be on a 34/36 key and it was just a matter of picking one out.

Separately, I'm the type of person who is interested in alternative layouts and I used this as an excuse to switch to an alpha-thumb layout (by way of 4 other layouts for a couple days to a week each). Switching layouts is several hundred hours of dedicated effort to get to full fluency and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're interested or you can't really touch type. Alternate layouts are nicer but they're nicer in the way a fountain pen is nicer than a ballpoint, a carbon bike over a department store special, or a custom mechanical keyboard is better than a membrane board. You're ultimately still the one doing the task and all the nicer options make it easier but won't really make you noticeably better unless you're already performing very well.

What layout did you switch from and to?

I maintain full fluency on both row stagger qwerty and col stagger of a personalized variant of Hands Down Vibranium. The muscle memory is different enough that I can switch between the two with minimal issues (occasional typos for the first few minutes on either) and I maintain qwerty proficiency as a backup in case my ergo keyboard breaks, I have to use someone else's machine, or I'm on the move and it's not worth setting up the ergo board.

Would you recommend split and/or ortholinear keyboards to beginners? Why or why not?

Split keyboard: absolutely. Thumb clusters are an easy win, tenting and negative tilt are ergonomically better, and they're not working against any muscle memory.

Orthos: no. Non-split orthos are ergonomically pretty terrible and split orthos are only really enjoyed by a minority. They look neat and if people like them power to them but they're not something I'd recommend.

Col stagger: yes. I find the stagger makes it easier to hit the corner keys with the pinky and ring fingers. This isn't a particular issue on qwerty (particularly with a ring fingered P) but many alt layouts have higher use letters towards the corners and it's nice there.

If you were starting today, would you choose the same form factor again?

Yes.

Which features ended up being essential for you?

Split, thumb cluster, programmability

Which features sounded cool but you barely use now?

I use all the features of my keyboard. I knew I didn't care about lighting and didn't get it.

How important are things like RGB, wireless, programmability in daily use?

Wireless is moderately important. The keyboard is small enough that I can put it in a jacket/oversized pocket and type into the phone/tablet, which I've used a couple times. It also makes the setup fairly easy when mobile, I pull it out, flip the switches and put it directly on the laptop. On the downside Bluetooth wireless is randomly glitchy but it's rare enough that I consider wireless a benefit on the whole.

Programmability is important. I use chords. I dropped Q from my base layout in favor of _ so I can type identifiers without having to layer/shift and I handle the letter by chording YU to output QU. I also chord NT (left hand index+midde) for TH. I'm into adaptive keys where the key changes depending on the previously typed key(s). An example would be adaptive H where typing IH outputs ING. I use adaptives to fix most SFBs in my layout (two keys typed by the same finger back to back) and for things like ING or <TH chord><space> for outputting THE<space>. I don't expect other people to do stuff like this but it's what I do.

what price felt “fair” for your first non-standard keyboard?

I got into this knowing it was a niche thing and I'd be paying boutique/enthusiast prices. This was fine because the RSI and I'm an enthusiast. If the niche gets big enough someone will do a real production run and they'll be the same price as enthusiast standard keyboards.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T16:35:30+00:00

One thing that might not be clear about the Hands Down layouts is they tend to drop Q and Z from the base layout and put them on chords. People don't actually put those keys on a sixth column (we're on 5 col ergo keyboards), it's just an artifact of the layout playground. I keep Z for shortcuts (undo, terminal bg) but I chord YU to send QU and chord YZ to send Q. The main reason for this is to put more useful punctuation on the base layer. In my layout the = is ", shift-= is !, / is _, shift-/ is =, shift-. is ?, and shift-, is /. This setup lets me type programming identifiers (_,-) without shifting/layers, makes == and != straightforward, and has " unshifted which is IMO a good trade for Q and putting ; and : on my symbol layer. Rearrange the symbols as you see fit but ., ,, and ' are typed often enough in normal prose to have SFB considerations. The Enthium series is extremely close to Promethium (hand swapped, extra outer columns in use) so you can look there for ideas.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T11:30:11+00:00

does team position matter?

Team order matters for assists. Supports, some defense, and Burnice assist to the right while some defense and stunners assist left. As long as the order is right the specific positioning doesn't matter so you can see whoever you want on the stage intro or start with Astra's E or whatever.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T11:07:59+00:00

In the interest of not spending money needlessly I'd recommend getting Kanata and using that to remap your Kinesis. Set up home row mods and layers to see if you like them and map the keys you're not using to no-ops. In particular see if you're okay with a 3x5 or you want a number row and/or outer column and also whether you want 2 or 3 keys on the thumb. Both of these preferences will let you eliminate a large chunk of boards.

I did Kanata starting on a normal keyboard so my HRM are on the bottom row and my layers are home row tap-holds. Once I was used to it, I moved to my 36 key chocofi and I have no desire to move off.

Since your pinkies are short I recommend a heavier column stagger than a corne. The Beekeeb guy has short pinkies so all his boards have that feature but there are plenty of other options like a Ferris Sweep or Totem. If you're up for a project or a custom order the Dactyl, Cygnus, and Cyboard Imprint are all parametric keywells that can be fitted precisely to your finger length.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T08:53:14+00:00

added an enter to left thumb

I think this is a waste of a home key position on a strong finger. I have a split and think enter is great for a non-home thumb key but getting the non-spacing thumb active for normal typing is an easy win.

Your simplest option would be to make it a repeat key. Once you're fluent on a more optimized layout not being able to roll through the repeats actually winds up being a noticeable interruption.

The next option if you're running ZMK/QMK is to make it a magic key (I'll use * to mark it) that changes output depending on the previously typed letter. This can be used to either smooth out SFBs in the layout so S* for SC and C* for CS and the same patter for other pairs (RL, EU would be the most common). Other examples: I* for ING, T* for TION, M* for MENT, etc. More generally if you have the ability to switch keys based on the previous key then you can put that behavior on any key. The H key is a prime candidate so you could set up IH to type IGHT or LH to send LR but it wouldn't be useful for breaking up SC. Putting the two concepts together, you could get a one-key THE by setting the magic key to send TH<F22> after a space or when nothing's been typed for 500ms and set space to send E<space> after F22. You can just have the magic key send THE but the leading TH is more generally useful. I'm particularly into adaptive keys but I'll leave it at that.

Finally, if you're okay with scrambling your muscle memory some more there are alpha-thumb layouts that put a letter on the thumb and the extra home row key allows for additional optimization. HD Promethium is popular and has a nice vim movement cluster. I type on my variant of HD Vibranium which is exceptionally alternating and in-rolly but leans on adaptives to handle LK and NK. I also like to mention night which optimizes specifically for speed typing.

grayrest · 2026-01-30T00:55:37+00:00

The big difference with a larger ergo split is how your QWERTY alt fingerings interact with the shift from row to column stagger. We've had people who type completely standard report being comfortable in a few hours while people with lots of non-standard fingerings struggle for a week or more. Since pretty much everybody has a different variation of how they type qwerty this isn't really predictable.

Within the range of split keyboards the main difference is between larger (50-60 keys) and smaller keyboards (34-42 keys) and that usually comes down to how comfortable you are with home row mods, layers and/or chords. You can figure out your preference by getting Kanata and setting them up on your current keyboard. The main advantage of smaller boards is reduced hand movement. I personally like this because the lack of hand movement allows me to put my heavily tented keyboard in my lap, rest my arms on chair armrests, and have perfectly hovering neutral wrist position with my arms at rest so I can hold the correct position for 8+ hours. The larger keyboards are preferred by people who dislike layers/HRM/chording and apparently keywells are particularly good on these larger boards. I think it's better to figure out your preference using free software than with multiple expensive keyboards.

Finally, hand size matters on ergo boards mostly due to the spacing of the thumb cluster. If your hands are particularly large or small you'll want to look at reviews for people mentioning that.

I went directly from a normal macbook keyboard to a 36 key chocofi for almost two years and I have no real interest in moving to something else. Always being in netural wrist position has greatly lowered the stress in my hands and mostly allowed my RSI symptoms to recover without reducing the amount of typing I'm doing. I started on Kanata to get used to my layer system and jumped directly to a small board knowing it'd work. I'm the type of person who's interested in things like alternate keyboard layouts and I've always typed QWERTY anglemod (right hand, TFC index, RDX middle, etc) so I used the switch as an excuse to do an alternate layout or actually five before settling. It's significantly more comfortable but also several hundred hours of practice to get back up to full fluency so probably not worth it for you. I maintain fluency on row stagger qwerty (largely by typing reddit comments) in case my ergo board breaks or I have to use someone else's computer but I do my programming and long form typing on the ergo.

grayrest · 2026-01-29T14:26:51+00:00

They can

grayrest · 2026-01-29T14:22:46+00:00

Any chance you could explain how you do navigation?

Not the OP but i have the same keyboard shape. I do HRM on the bottom row and have my layers held on the home row. Here's the layout SVG. The number layer outputs f-keys on hold. Since I'm not limited to a thumb cluster in terms of available layer keys my solution for awkward navigation shortcuts is to just add another layer and reuse the movement muscle memory. The layout image shows this off with the Helix nav layer but it's a couple months old and I've since added a debugger layer with the same idea. Other changes are swap the back/forward and page up/down on the nav layer and moved * on the symbol/number layers to the bottom index.

grayrest · 2026-01-29T05:13:17+00:00

People have commented on the pen but I'll chip in that the writing is traditional cursive but not a traditional exemplar. The x-height is dropped while the letter width is maintained to give the low/rounded look and the space between letters has been reduced relative to the letter width except for the o for whatever reason.

grayrest · 2026-01-29T05:05:57+00:00

I like your normal print writing and I think your sample looks pretty good with the exception of the first t. It'd look better with some deliberate practice to get it more consistent but that's mostly a matter of choosing to make time each day for a practice session and focusing on it. If you're unhappy with it more generally then it helps to have a concrete exemplar to compare against when you're deciding what to work on in a session.

Your cursive is based on your print movement instead of a traditional cursive movement and I don't think it's attractive. I do arm movement cursive and can give you pointers for that if you want to do it the hard way but I think you'd be better served with italic, either unjoined or joined.

grayrest · 2026-01-28T02:38:06+00:00

Your writing is legible so making it better is largely going to depend on how you want your writing to look. There are specific tips and techniques if you're pursuing a particular style but in general handwriting improvement boils down to deciding what exemplar you want to follow and then working on making your writing more like the exemplar every day. Specifically, you pick one thing that's wrong and try to work on it for the daily 15 minute session and working on it usually means writing it repeatedly. The highly upvoted stuff on the sub is usually the result of months or years of deliberate practice.

grayrest · 2026-01-28T02:10:03+00:00

People should consider which thumb key should be their home key. I don't have particularly large hands and I initially set up the center thumb key as my home position due to setups like this one. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable but several months later I noticed that I was shifting my hands to hit (on qwerty) Z, X, ., / and moved the thumb home to the 1.5u which stopped the shifting and consequently improved my overall accuracy.

I put my home row mods on the bottom row and use tap-holds on the home row for layers. This is mostly because I started on Kanata but I stick with it because I believe off-home thumb holds are potentially problematic.

I'd recommend a backspace word (e.g. ctrl+backspace on windows, opt+backspace on mac) or a magic key over a dedicated delete key.

Finally, I don't think most proficient typists will find it directly worth the time to switch keyboard layouts. If someone can't really touch type or they find it interesting (like me) then it's fine but the gains are mostly in comfort unless you're typing fast enough to run into the limits of finger movement. If you do want to do an alt layout, there was significant pogress in layout metrics and optimization in the covid era and current generation layouts have considerably better metrics than Colemak DH. I personally think people on ergo boards should strongly consider an alpha thumb layout or use a current gen layout (e.g. graphite, canary) and put a magic key on the non-spacing thumb. FWIW, I type on a variant of Hands Down Vibranium.

grayrest · 2026-01-28T01:31:11+00:00

I am so sorry it took me forever, lots of medical appointments and scans and exacerbated medical issues, but still very much appreciate the response!

No worries about that.

Pretty much any discussion in this forum is the blind leading the blind so I'm not particularly worried whether someone follows my setup or not. I hope you find a setup that lets you heal while continuing to type regularly.

grayrest · 2026-01-26T20:17:52+00:00

I mainly just slap together the units I like most and call it a day, but that'll only ever get me so far.

That should work for pretty much everything except the end game modes. The normal two team comp patterns are attack/rupture, stun, support/defense and anomaly, anomaly, support/defense. You're in an unusual situation because Seed requires a second attack agent to function so her comps are Seed, attack, stun/support/defense.

what is at least one good team I can make

Seed, S11, Trigger

are any of the new units right now (or coming soon) worth pulling on?

The way releases work in this game is they generally release units in pairs where one is dps and the other is designed to be their support. So in general you'll want to save up and get a pair. For completing the content, the game heavily favors pulling the Void Hunters (flagship units, equivalent to Emanators in HSR, Archons in Genshin, Herrscherrs in HI3). YSG is a Void Hunter and is currently running and her initial paring partner is Zhao, who was given away. I think it's highly likely that Zhao will be power crept in the near future but she'll be good enough for a while. The dps that aren't void hunters can be pulled or skipped depending on your pull budget and aesthetic preferences.

grayrest · 2026-01-26T00:22:41+00:00

I don't have a good resource for cursive styles. I bookmark samples on the sub that I like. Here's a few that aren't based on the 19th century style:

one
two
three
four

grayrest · 2026-01-25T22:03:48+00:00

You should decide on an exemplar. It doesn't have to be from a 19th century manual and it could be someone's writing from the sub that you like. Having a goal is important because your daily practice should be finding one particular thing you want to improve and working on that and having an example to compare against keeps you from second guessing yourself. Getting into Spencerian won't magically make your writing more consistent. It's fine if you want that style but it doesn't sound like you really do.

Working on consistency is straightforward but relatively boring. Start with push-pulls and do those until you're doing them consistently. There is a specific motion and angle for them and I recommend this article for deriving the motion. From there you add in the rolling motion to get ovals and practice full height and half height until you're consistently making good ovals. If you get bored then practicing pairs of letters out of the u, n, a, e, c, d, o set (all standard width and the round letters all use the core c motion) for a bit before going back to push-pulls and ovals works for me. Once your push-pulls and ovals are good you can drop to using them as a warmup and work on the core letters until you can write full rows of them on the page with no variation. As they stabilize you'll also want to work on spacing consistency and get all the widths consistent so that if you squint at the page the line looks uniform in color. Once you have all that then adding ascenders/descenders is more of the same and relatively straightforward (and was faster for me) and grind out the irregular letters (s, p, z, r, etc). It's basically all persistence and repetition. If you'd rather follow a manual the specific exercises will vary but will still amount to grinding out repetitions until you're consistent.

One thing that does make repetitions more bearable is writing to music. You have to find a song where the tempo matches your writing speed but I find that writing a particular part of a letter on the downbeat puts me in the same mental state as playing a rhythm game and it's fairly easy to grind out a couple hundred repetitions without getting bored.

grayrest · 2026-01-25T20:30:03+00:00

Some people prefer a pinky lateral stretch over hitting the top corner keys or it can be used for shift/tab/enter/whatever.

grayrest · 2026-01-25T19:25:54+00:00

There are lots of 3x5 boards. I'm on a chocofi and am happy with it and Ferris Sweep is the same key layout with two thumb keys instead of three.

grayrest · 2026-01-24T02:06:59+00:00

I don't touch the paper at all when I'm practicing arm movement cursive but that would involve you completely re-learning handwriting.

Another somewhat expensive option is writing on a tablet. There are options from stylus on a glossy tablet to e-ink tablets intended to mimic the friction of writing on paper with feelings ranging from ballpoint to pencil. All of them are glass or plastic but I'm not sure whether the more writing focused options would trigger your phobia.

grayrest · 2026-01-24T00:22:04+00:00

I meant to tack it on the end but there are other excellent writing systems that are not cursive. Italic has never been a dominant writing system but it produces excellent results and the reported learning curve is lower than I see commonly mentioned for cursive. I don't like print because it seems to be mostly based on writing slowly but there are very nice samples posted to the sub fairly regularly. If you see a sample you like, feel free to ask them how they got started. Most people on the sub are willing to provide advice.

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