How using mouse and keyboard can lead to physical pain, emotional pain, psychological trauma and panic attacks
So, I'm left-handed and this is where it all begins. Historically I was using other people's computers and they all had mice configured for right-handed people, so I had to start using mouse with right hand. I felt significant discomfort but computer games made me stop thinking about parents' abuse so physical discomfort was a small price to pay. But of course, ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away. And over decades it adds up. Greatly.
Using right-handed mouse had far reaching consequences. First, at least in my brain, I notice that in order to move mouse precisely I mentally keep my right hand fixed while I move my entire body with my left hand. I know, this doesn't make any sense but this is how I mentally manage to use my dominant hand because my right hand is barely capable of doing fine movements. This is greatly exacerbated by helicopter-based GUIs. However, in order to "move the mouse in right hand with left hand" I need to keep both of my hands close to each other in front of me. And this leads to the way I use keyboard.
Historically I came to the setup where the right side of keyboard and left side of mouse pad are exactly in the center and align with the middle of the monitor. This minimizes the physical pain when using the mouse but has great consequences in how I use keyboard. With this setup using the left side of keyboard where all the letters are is very physically painful. So I avoid the left side of keyboard at all costs. This means using WASD for shooters is out of question. I use arrow keys. However, I don't get similar keys to Q and E and I can reach much less keys without looking at the keyboard. For me it's basically right ctrl, right shift, enter, backspace, delete, end, page down and numpad.
Playing video games with arrow keys is challenging. Historically, I started playing Counter-Strike at computer club where you don't rebind keys but arrow keys were available. But reload was still bound to R. So WASD players could reload blindly while I had to look away from the monitor and at the keyboard, find the R key, press it and move my hand back to arrow keys. This gave me significant disadvantage over WASD players but I got used to this suffering and played like that for 10 (TEN!!!) years. Ultimately, I realized that this doesn't make sense and bound reload to "delete" key so I can reload blindly like WASD players. I was very ashamed of myself at that time because it took me 10 years to rebind the keys to minimize suffering when playing video games. But now I can forgive myself because I understand that all my mental resources were dedicated to sustaining the abuse of my parents and I didn't have any left to think about how I use computer and minimize (or maybe even eliminate) suffering when using it.
Video games is, of course, not the only thing that requires keyboard. The other significant thing is typing text. Naturally, since using the left side of keyboard hurts, typing text hurts. Now I realize why I always took time to write the code in my head and didn't want to write it on the keyboard - it hurts! Typing every line of code over at least last 10 years hurt. This is insane. Well, without even being conscious about it, I started having considerable anxiety whenever there was a need to type text. And do you know what is the most common thing that requires typing text? Linux terminal. Oh yeah. Using terminal was always associated with years and years of pain writing text. I was very scared of terminal, I avoided it at all costs. I tried to always find a mouse-driven GUI because I already minimized physical pain when using mouse because of video games.
But sometimes there is no GUI. There is no escape from the pain. And my first encounter with this was VPS. My wife has saved me an insane amount of pain when she taught me how to use SSHFS so I can mount server's file system and navigate it with mouse as if it was local. But there was no way to edit config files and type SSH commands with mouse. I mean, I guess I could have installed on-screen keyboard but then I would have to suffer when doing fine mouse movements to click on the proper key. Configuring my server was hell but I managed to survive it.
But the biggest trauma was in January 2018. I was visiting a local user group related to programming and one time I happened to be the only person with laptop so we added projector to it and I was showing my stuff. As usual, I tried to use everything with mouse to minimize the pain. But then the organizer went "why don't you use a terminal?" with further rhetoric in the ballpark of "real Linux users use terminal". I... complied during that day but internally I was furious. Before that I didn't really meet Linux users in real life so I generally thought that people share my suffering of using terminal (and typing text in general) and avoid it. And people who say that terminal is better or post articles and guides consisting of terminal commands are just trolls or insane nobodies. But now I saw a real flesh-and-blood human being like that. So that's what it is. Linux terminal users emotionally and psychologically abuse other people to force them to use terminal and derive pleasure from that. Linux terminal users are psychopatic sadists just like my parents.
From that point forward terminal users became my enemy. And terminal itself became The Great Embodiment Of Evil. I was putting all resources I had to avoid it. This issue also became the reason of a couple of conflicts with my wife who prefers to do everything with keyboard. Eventually, I started having panic attacks from just seeing her use her computers. My mental health was tanking.
But the VPS is what eventually put me into a huge breakdown. I've tried to put X server on the VPS so I can avoid using terminal but I couldn't. And nothing made sense anymore. Obviously, there was one command to solve this:
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
rm -rf / --no-preserve-root
Yeah, that solved the problem. After that I was in such huge breakdown that I went to rant with gems such as
"If you want to use Linux, you have to know terminal" "If you want to know terminal, you have to be white male neckbeard incel virgin who hates women"
Yeah, decades of physical and emotional pain and trauma from using mouse and keyboard started breaking me down completely. However, my father was still alive so I couldn't focus on this problem.
The breakthrough was a week ago. I was watching my wife play ARMA 3. It is a military simulator notorious for having so many commands that almost all keyboard keys are used for something. When I played it myself, I had to spend about 3 hours (no kidding!) rebinding dozens and dozens of keys to play the game with arrow keys but I still suffered considerably because there were still plenty of keys on the left side of the keyboard. As a result, I didn't use almost half of the features the game presented because there was simply too much pain to use them. But my wife had no problem. I was blown away. She played so much better than me just because she could press all keyboard keys without physical pain.
This was enough. This is insane. I suffer huge pain from using mouse and keyboard. I have panic attacks from seeing my wife use her computers. I suffer in video games because my hand can't reach as many keys as WASD players can. I can't even play some games (like Enter The Gungeon) because they assume that people don't use "delete" key for gaming or have bugs where some keys are not recognized at all (like Enter key in many Source engine games, some were patched but Left 4 Dead 2 is still unplayable).
And all of it started because I used right hand for my mouse. Damn. I have bought a keypad which is basically the left half of the keyboard so I will have access to enough keys as WASD players have and I can put it near mouse pad so I will suffer the same amount of pain as using arrow keys. I also bought a graphic tablet because there is no way I will try to learn to draw with right hand. The next step is buying ambidextrous mouse so I can use my left hand with it and have keyboard to my right side. This can totally make the keypad obsolete but it is still a good temporary solution before I change mouse. And after all of that I need my neck taken care of. I really want to undo all the damage that using mouse with right hand did to my neck. I don't want to suffer any pain at all when using computers.
