I&#x27;ve been using a pedal on my Kinesis for a shift key for about 5-10 years now.<p>At some point I noticed that my left pinky was experiencing more pain than my other 9 fingers, due to its heavy use for holding shift and ctrl while pressing other keys. The Kinesis has two lovely ctrl keys in the thumb position, so I trained myself to start using those instead by remapping the pinky-placed ctrl key to F12. (Initially I just unmapped it, letting it devolve back into the awful capslock key, but F12 actually proved to be a better deterrent for retraining, as its negative effect was immediate.)<p>That helped with the pain, but only a little. So I bit the bullet and mapped the shift key to F11, forcing me to use my foot pedal for shfit.<p>Even after years of practice, it&#x27;s still hard to use. The timing of a foot press is very different from a finger press -- the leg muscles require more time to build up the extra force necessary for the pedal. (The pedal is much stiffer than a keyboard key, because it has to accept the weight of the front of my foot without triggering, as opposed to the weight of a single finger.) I still find myself capitalizing the second letter of a word because of this issue. wHich looks ridiculous. And it forces me to sit squarely in my chair, with legs uncrossed, which I find very unnatural.<p>But my left pinky doesn&#x27;t hurt anymore.