 Hi everyone, my name is John Paul Helveston and I want to talk today about some solutions for keeping our hands happy and healthy while typing. Last year I typed 7.5 million keystrokes and if you're a regular R user like me chances are you too are racking up some serious mileage on your keyboard which can lead to pain and serious injury. So today I want to talk about some tools and suggestions to take better care of your hands while typing. My first suggestion is just simply to practice your typing. I thought I had pretty good typing skills but I found I was able to increase both my speed and accuracy by about 20% with just two months of daily practice on keybr.com. So take some time out to work on your typing most people can benefit from it. My next suggestion is to master your keyboard shortcuts. Our studio is packed with excellent shortcuts like Alt plus dash to create an assignment operator or command shift M to make a pipe but there are way more ways that you can become a more efficient coder. For example, if you have a lot of messy code that's not aligned and you want to get it all aligned just select it and type control I and our studio will align all of it for you. One of my favorite shortcuts is to generate multiple cursors by holding the Alt key down and selecting some lines and this is really helpful for editing vectors or creating vectors like you're seeing in this image. You can also create your own shortcuts by using a text expander which are programs that convert keywords into text snippets. In the example on the left I'm using some custom expansions to write some ggplot code for a scatter plot and on the right I'm using a single keyword to generate a code chunk that I use in most of my rmarkdown files. My favorite expander is an open source one called Espansso and if you want to learn more about it you can check out a blog post I wrote on it on my website at jhelvi.com. Another tip is to use custom keyboard layers. Every keyboard has at least two layers the base layer of numbers and lowercase letters and another layer of symbols and uppercase letters that happens when you hold shift. Unfortunately many of the most useful keys for coding like our navigation arrows require us to move our hands away from home row position. A nice solution is to use a custom layer to move these keys back to a more convenient location. For example on my keyboard I remapped my caps lock key to trigger a new layer that has the navigation arrows and forward and back delete under my right hand and cut copy paste under my left hand. So as you can see on this demo here when I have this layer enabled I can quickly move around the cursor and manipulate code in our studio without ever really needing to leave home row. I implemented this particular solution using a program called carabiner elements which is for Mac only but on windows most people use a very similar program called auto hockey so I highly suggest you check these out they have great features to improve the efficiency of your typing. In addition to all these software tools I highly recommend using some type of a split keyboard. Split keyboards fix a lot of ergonomic problems compared to standard keyboards like reducing the ulnar deviation from twisting your wrists outward and most keyboards that are split also have some small tenting angle to reduce forearm pronation. Now one of the downsides to split keyboards is that they can be a little more expensive though there are plenty of great options for around a hundred dollars but I encourage you to consider your keyboard just like a medical device like a pair of glasses which can easily cost over a hundred dollars without glasses I couldn't read my own code but without a good keyboard I couldn't type it either so investing in a good keyboard is an investment in the health of your hands your wrists and your shoulders. To really max out the benefits of a split keyboard consider one that has dedicated thumb keys like the ergonomics your thumbs are really strong and they're very useful for way more things than just hitting the spacebar so consider using these thumb keys for other features. The ergonomics in particular is rather expensive but if you're feeling ambitious you can build your own for a lot less there's actually a pretty big community of keyboard hobbyists and building your own keyboard these days is actually rather straightforward keyboards like the iris shown here can be snapped together like a set of Legos. Finally if you're going to invest in a good keyboard consider getting one that is fully programmable this enables you to implement many of the solutions I mentioned like custom layers directly into the keyboard itself. Okay that's all I have thanks for listening and I look forward to any comments or questions you might have if you want to learn more about anything I mentioned here are some links and feel free to reach out to me directly on Twitter or by email.