Been out of the business for over 5 years now and hadn't thought about vi since then but I know what you mean. When first exposed to it back in the early 80's I thought it was ridiculous but once learned, it was the best editor there ever was as far as I'm concerned.

Standing Desk?
 

My new office (when we get the permanent office built out in a couple weeks) has interesting desks. They are height-adjustable and can be cranked up to above waist height, which means that I could stand up at the desk.

I am thinking about getting a particularly high chair (like bar stool height) and alternating between sitting and standing.

What do you all think? Anyone tried this? Seems like it would reduce my resemblance to a sack of potatoes for 12 hours a day.

Oh, on the topic of keyboards, I think the ergo keyboards do in fact make a difference. Forcing your hands to be flat all day (palms pointing straight down) is a strain (you can feel it in your forearms), the wrist's natural position is with the palms pointing toward each other. Unfortunately I cannot use an ergo keyboard, because one of the applications I use requires a proprietary keyboard.

There's a guy on my floor who stands at his workstation all day...I suspect he has back issues or something.

You should look further into the Kinesis keyboards. They're very programmable and between that and some intermediary software you could probably replicate the proprietary keystrokes your current kbd generates.

I tried the Kinesis keyboard for a couple days but I gave up.

Another engineer in the office uses one and he loves it. He said his typing speed has gone up significantly.

The proprietary KB includes a fingerprint reader.

Bummer

That's one hell of a proprietary keyboard...would you have to kill us if you told us about it?

It is just the standard Bloomberg terminal keyboard.

Bloomberg has used a proprietary keyboard for many years, but it was just a matter of some custom keys, in fact you could use an overlay for the same effect. So you could install Bloomberg on a shared PC and everyone in the office could use it. Bloomberg didn't like this, so they started including fingerprint readers in the keyboards so that each Bloomberg account is tied to a specific person. A Bloomberg subscription costs about $20K/yr so they are highly motivated to make sure every user buys one.

Edit: there is a "kiosk" subscription of Bloomberg, I assume they must block some of the more useful functionality, not sure.