After spending hour after hour most days on the computer for several years, I realized the word “ergonomics” is very important. Believe it or not, I now have an ergonomic computer chair, a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 and mouse, with a computer table that is custom made and designed with proper height. When I simply settled for any chair and table, I had a terrible ache in my shoulder that wouldn’t get better even after going for weekly professional shoulder massages. When I started to use the proper chair, table, mouse and keyboard, the pain slowly disappeared.
We would probably agree when people tell us that the PC mouse is one of the best computer related inventions, but if used incorrectly it can also cause discomfort in the wrist. According to the developers of a piece of software called MouseFIGHTER, its so much more ergonomically correct for the human body if we control Windows with the keyboard alone, without the mouse! Most of the time the mouse is placed at the side of the keyboard and when we need to move the cursor, we have to first pick up our hand to grab the mouse to move the cursor, do the clicking, and then the hand goes back to the keyboard. Doing that a few times is not too bad but if you have a task that requires you to constantly do that for extended periods, you’ll notice that your arm starts to ache. Thanks to MouseFIGHTER, we can now control Windows using the keyboard alone, without the mouse.
I have previously written an article on how to navigate and use the computer without the mouse or touchpad using MouseKeys and and MouseEmulator, but both of them use the numeric keypad which is not so ergonomic. And it is obviously not possible to use a keypad on a large number of laptops if you’re having trouble with the touchpad and wish to use such a utility. As for MouseFIGHTER, it has both a standard and ergonomic configuration where the standard setting uses the normal arrow keys for the mouse directions. As for the Ergonomic configuration, it uses keys such as D, F, I and J for cursor movements so that your hands will stay at the correct position on your keyboard when you switch to typing.
During initial testing, I found it hard to move the cursor to the place that I wanted using the ergonomic model. It is definitely not something that you can automatically get adjusted to it within seconds, but I believe if you put more time and effort into the ergonomic model configuration, it will eventually pay off and you will be putting much less strain on your wrist and arm as a result. The good part is, if you are not comfortable with either of the pre-set configurations, you can define the keys yourself.
A few options are there to make the movement a little bit smoother such as the start and stop acceleration speeds, and the screen percentage jump size. In the advanced settings you can turn off the on screen display and enable automatic switching which will turn off the MouseFIGHTER mouse keys when a key is pressed that isn’t a configured mouse key.
Although MouseFIGHTER requires installation, it can actually be made portable by copying the whole MouseFIGHTER folder to another computer and run the MouseFIGHTER.exe file to launch the program. The most recent release of MouseFIGHTER also supports multiple monitors. The program is free and works on Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 and requires the Microsoft .NET v2 Framework or higher which is preinstalled in Vista and 7 anyway.