philbrown wrote:I do a ton of editing 7 days a week for weeks at a time and can barely take my hand off the mouse for stretches of time. I've developed a bad case of tennis elbow in my right elbow. I'm trying to understand how this mouse could help, but am about to order one just on the chance that it could help me. I'm using a Logitech Performance MX right now. If anyone else has any info they'd like to chime in with, I'm in pain and open for ideas.
I bought the Performance MX a while back, thanks to this thread. My assessment of it is in my previous post above. It's a good mouse, and probably the best actual "mouse" I've ever used. But if you are in pain, I have to suggest the
Magic Trackpad. It takes a week to get accustomed to using it, but for most people after a week they'll never go back to anything else. There is one secret, however, that probably eludes a lot of people: a good, tall, firm wrist-rest. You simply must prop up your hand so that the fingers are dangling over the trackpad. In that position you can go forever without pain.
One thing that is important (for any input device) to stop elbow pain and wrist pain is to use shortcuts for operations that repeatedly take you mousing across the screen and back. The more shortcuts you have, the less your hand has to move. That's where the Magic Trackpad is like no other. I have 81 shortcuts programmed into it for various apps. (Use
Jitouch, a 3rd party app) They are easy to remember; it's like sign language or something. I have about 30 global shortcuts (give or take a few), and then 5 to 10 for each of about 8 apps. Many of those shortcuts involve drawing a character on the pad with two fingers separated by about 1.5 inches. By characters, I mean letters: A, B, C... etc. Others are combinations of finger taps, strokes, and slides. It really makes it easy.
Some people really don't want the Magic Trackpad, so if you really want the
Performance MX mouse, I think it's a good choice. Let me suggest one shortcut setup:
- Left & Right mouse buttons:
- Left button: regular click
Right button: "Mouse Sensitivity."
What this does is to slow the mouse to a crawl (you set a slider for the speed you want it) so that you can focus on selecting small objects without overshooting a lot. This enables you to set the normal mouse speed for VERY fast. You can rip across the screen with the tiniest movement, then when you get to your target, right-click and you're suddenly moving at a crawl. Select your target, right-click, and you're off speed-mousing around the screen again. That means you have to use Control-Click for a "right click," but I have never liked right-clicking a mouse anyway. I always use Control-Click. Of course, you still have several other buttons you could use for that, but I found myself needing those buttons for other things. The Right-Click button was the only one that consistently was not in use for any app, and accidentally clicking the right-click button set this way won't do anything but slow down the mouse, so that seemed like the logical place for it.
Just a suggestion, but all my devices are set up to minimize pain and excess repetitive movement. Thought you might appreciate that one.
One more thing about this mouse (and most mice) is that you will be accidentally clicking a lot until you develop some hand position/method to avoid it. The buttons go to the end of the mouse, and the only place you can rest your middle finger is on the buttons themselves, or reach beyond and rest on the desktop.
Shoosh