What started off as a quest to alleviate arm strain has now developed into a new way of interfacing with my computer.
Near the top of the pandemic, I was playing an unreal amount of the pc game Counter Strike, which means many repetitive motions and lots of clicking. All of these repetitive actions eventually led to tennis elbow. Over the course of this ordeal, I learned that it can also be referred to as computer elbow, which is more accurate in my case, as cringey as that may be. Both conditions refer to the same underlying problem—lateral epicondylitis.
Unfortunately, this injury was going to take more time to heal than I was capable of breaking from the computer. This set me on my quest to find alternatives to clicking. I started off only interested in a substitute for left/right click, but soon realized a few other common operations could be attached to these pedals. I currently have 5 pedals, below is a picture with each role labeled.
The Play/Pause media controls are utilized regularly enough to warrant a foot pedal. The scroll down / Scroll down pedals are bound to down arrow / up arrow; These pedal bindings are enormously helpful when reading, browsing & scrolling through most web content. The left/right click pedals do just that–Keep in mind I still click with the mouse, I just use these as an alternative for when my injury is flaring up.
The triggers for these can be adjusted fairly easily. As I continue using the computer with foot pedals, I am coming up
with new configurations. For example, when I play Minecraft, I change scroll down to w (walk forward) & scroll up
to d (walk backward).
There are many other applications for these foot pedals beyond gaming. If I was spending more time in the command line, I would probably set up one of the pedals to act as a vim clutch to toggle between insert & normal mode. That pretty much concludes my post, I spoke to a handful of friends about using usb foot pedals in this way and 90% of them didn’t realize that foot pedals could be utilized outside of gaming or transcription. As such, I wanted to drop a quick post highlighting the potential of usb foot pedals to get the word out.
I think that there might be some great potential for combining pedal usage with AutoHotKey scripts in the future–I have some notes on writing ahk scripts here .
Happy new year!
Further Reading
- Buy Triple Switch Here
- Buy Double Switch Here
- Aleksandr Levchuk’s Famous Vim Clutch