I'd say I'm pretty heavy keyboard user - a touch-typing programmer, about 15 years in the profession. So what do I have to say about this? When your RSI begins, ergonomic keyboard may help you, may not help you, and often can make the problem even worse.
The way I see it, there are 2 main causes of RSI:
1) you work under stress, and you are hitting the keys much stronger and you are flexing your muscles much more than when you are more relaxed - this is a tremendous strain on your hands,
2) you are using a certain keyboard shortcut or successive combination thereof, or you are repeating certain specific movement which is causing you the RSI, while the RSI feels as if it's coming from the general usage of the keyboard, from generally using it too much.
3) (bonus point) It's something unrelated, like a missing vitamin or mineral in your body, or a heightened presence of a free radical or some other negative element. (I'm not a doctor so I won't elaborate here.)
I don't know how many ergonomic keyboards from Microsoft I destroyed while I was still on PC, but now I'm on a MBP 17" and at one point I had to work with a bandage on my left hand, in pain. Turned out the cause were the shortcuts for application and window switching on OS X. This was CMD+Tab and CMD+` (on an US keyboard layout, so the both Tab and ` are kind of higher). So what I did, I searched for an app[1] to remap the keys to a much more sane[2] combinations, and that fixed my hand.
[2] this just made me realize the default shortcut combinations for app and window switch are in fact insane. And I don't think Lion solves this with the 2 finger swipe, which is one hell of a long movement, if you have to do it hundreds(?) times a day. At least the swipe gives you a switching direction, as otherwise, generally, app and window switching is one of the weakest design points of OS X, IMHO.
The way I see it, there are 2 main causes of RSI:
1) you work under stress, and you are hitting the keys much stronger and you are flexing your muscles much more than when you are more relaxed - this is a tremendous strain on your hands,
2) you are using a certain keyboard shortcut or successive combination thereof, or you are repeating certain specific movement which is causing you the RSI, while the RSI feels as if it's coming from the general usage of the keyboard, from generally using it too much.
3) (bonus point) It's something unrelated, like a missing vitamin or mineral in your body, or a heightened presence of a free radical or some other negative element. (I'm not a doctor so I won't elaborate here.)
I don't know how many ergonomic keyboards from Microsoft I destroyed while I was still on PC, but now I'm on a MBP 17" and at one point I had to work with a bandage on my left hand, in pain. Turned out the cause were the shortcuts for application and window switching on OS X. This was CMD+Tab and CMD+` (on an US keyboard layout, so the both Tab and ` are kind of higher). So what I did, I searched for an app[1] to remap the keys to a much more sane[2] combinations, and that fixed my hand.
[1] KeyRemap4Macbook, my config here: https://github.com/ypocat/misc/blob/master/keyremap4macbook/...
[2] this just made me realize the default shortcut combinations for app and window switch are in fact insane. And I don't think Lion solves this with the 2 finger swipe, which is one hell of a long movement, if you have to do it hundreds(?) times a day. At least the swipe gives you a switching direction, as otherwise, generally, app and window switching is one of the weakest design points of OS X, IMHO.