My arthritis is getting worse, and I am finding it increasingly more painful to use a mouse, trackball or pad (tried them all), and my thumbs when typing. I get trigger thumb/finger a lot, and it’s just getting wearing. This is making it very hard for me to build forms in Anvil, and to type code in general.
I am getting pretty good at prompting LLMs like Claude to build back end functions wrapped around uplink, and voice recognition is becoming increasingly more useful to create the prompts (though it’s far from perfect).
The difficulty is really around front ends. I cannot find an easy way to get LLMs to build the yaml files and get acceptable form layouts. I’d like to build an “accessibility layer” on top of Anvil for people like me, and it’s a rabbit hole I’m just starting to look in to.
Does anyone else have this issue? Does anyone have some interesting ideas on this?
I have had some success prompting LLMs to build frontends using backbone.js and the like, but it’s hard work to get any consistency. I’d like to keep using Anvil, I just fear I may not be able to for physical reasons.
Sorry to hear that. I had really bad shoulder pain for a few months that made it impossible to pronate my wrists so I had to get a vertical keyboard and basically stop using a mouse. Thankfully that’s behind me.
One thing I’d try is the “roller mouse” if you haven’t already. It is very expensive but was helpful to me in some ways.
Have you tried with a 3D mouse?
On one hand (no pun intended) they require more dexterity because they do more, on the other hand they do more with less movement, and if that less movement fits in your no-pain range, that could help. There are several types, and there may be a type that fits you.
Another thing could be using the touchscreen, where you move the arm more than the finger or the wrist. I have an Asus Zenbook, a laptop with two monitors, one vertical and one horizontal next to the keyboard. The horizontal one makes using the touchscreen very easy, it’s like a touchpad on steroids. But you already said you tried the pad, so this maybe out of the question.
Bending my fingers is the thing that causes pain and leads to problems like trigger finger. I use my left hand’s thumb for the shift key, for example, and I have to bend if for that.
I had a thumb controlled vertical trackball which gave me trigger thumb for 6 months.
What I think I’m looking for is a mouse/pad I can use with my right hand for movement, and the buttons on the left side . I could then use both hands open without bending anything. I may have to build one…
I find typing not too bad (apart from the shift of course), I shall check out the asus zenbook to see what you mean…
edit - Ah do you mean the Duo? That looks interesting. Wonder if you could use the second screen as a large track pad (with some software to move the pointer on the second screen)… maybe not
Some software like PhotoShop (that I don’t have) come with the software for that second screen, and it’s great. You get an extended dynamic keyboard with nobs and sliders. Look at the 5th and 6th photos here.
I don’t use it much, because I always work with the external 40" monitor, but yes, it can be used as extended touch screen monitor (both monitors are touch), or as large mouse pad. I just keep two windows in it: an Anvil monitor app (it polls every 2 seconds and shows the status of some servers) so I it’s always visible and easily scrollable, and a browser page on the radio I’m listening to, so I can quickly tap on it when the phone rings.
I think the best use would be to create an app to keep in that monitor that exposes all the helpers you need, just like PhotoShop does. But I must confess that it’s just a neat idea and I have no clue how to implement.
My desktop. I used to get a lot of shoulder pain so I use a mouse as little as possible and swapped it for a track pad. The split ortho linear keyboard also makes a huge difference.
I’ve just ordered a USB programmable, 2 key keyboard to act as my mouse buttons (only a tenner just to prove the principle). I’m going to search next for a track pad.
I’m avoiding an ergo keyboard for the moment as I’m working from my motorhome a lot these days, and I’m trying to remain as compact as possible.
But more seriously, the ortholinear layout makes more difference than I expected. I’ve had split keyboards previously and they’re also great but this a big step forward.
But… It has to be portable. I can’t type on a normal staggered keyboard now!
Check this out, I love hacking things together myself, but this is a pre-made all in one solution:
I have been following the video, head / hand tracking industry for a long while. Long before it became incorporated into VR/AR/XR etc. I think I still have one of those beta version magic leap trackers in a box somewhere.
Anyway it’s much closer to a “take it out of the box and use it” experience than it has been for the past 35 years.
I also feel like it would be easier to build an accessibility layer for the design pane if there was more documentation on the yaml underlying it – especially the grid positioning parts. then we humans could create one and also hand it to LLMs to give better answers to making forms.
FWIW, I would totally be willing to collaborate on making an accessibility tool and or layer that could help people with arthritis, as well as other disabilities use anvil more easily.
I get why there’s not - it’s not in Anvil’s interest to spend time on this when the IDE really their main revenue stream.
I did have some success in adding components this way when the IDE was making it very hard to position components accurately. I’ll see what I can dig out.
Just about to send you a PM (give it 5 mins from this post appearing).
You post seems to have touched a nerve (another pun alert!). I suffered from frozen shoulder last year and something I didn’t see mentioned was using one of the code completion AI tools like Codeium as a plugin to VS-Code (rather than prompting an LLM directly). I’ve been very impressed with how it auto-completes many of my code blocks and therefore saves me a lot of key presses.
Also like other editors I’m sure, VS-Code can be almost entirely driven with keyboard shortcuts and user defined code snippets, which reduces your overall number of clicks and key presses. Mastering its helpful features like multiple cursors for changing many lines at once and F12 for going to where a given function is first defined are also great ways of minimising reliance.
And a final (probably patronising) thought which I’d do well to heed more often myself: More time spent thinking around problems in the first place rather than instinctively diving for the keyboard and feeling the need to “produce” lines of code. So many times I wish I’d paused to think about other better approaches before diving in to yet another “trial and error” REPL session.
Hope you find some ways to deal with the pain and carry on coding happily David!
