My hypothesis is that vim style work (without moving a wrist even a bit) is the reason people get carpel tunnel. I anecdotally see far fewer (none?) People who don't do vim/emacs getting these injuries. Makes sense as well right? Just like "take a walk and don't sit in the same place" but for your fingers
I don't know about carpel tunnel, but the reason I became interested in Vim/Emacs was due to RSI caused by using a mouse. This was my first job, doing shudders Java-EE (7) web development (no live re-loading, tons of clicking in IDE, manually reloading web-page etc, crappy windows touch-pad etc).
Started learning Rails, drank the Kool-Aid, switched to VIM. I don't use VIM for development at my day-job, mostly just key-bindings in Intellij/VS Code, however, the amount of time saved has been worth the effort, and no RSI (also thankfully am able to use the fantastic track-pad on mac and a trackball for anything else).
Lately I've been feeling the pull to learn Emacs after learning about ORG-Mode and the extensibility of the software... unfortunately, the time investment here is likely to have no real benefit in my (current) work as a Java dev. Sigh, time to browse the who's hiring thread.
Using Vim has helped my finger/wrist/arm/shoulder/neck pain and soreness, but you're on to something in that the real problem is probably more repetitive motions than any specific motions.
But Vim (and emacs) solves the repetitive motion problem by providing several means of readily repeating commands.
Most people seem to both type and use their mouse much more slowly than I do. And they also don't often have to (or want to), e.g. cleanup thousands of rows in an Excel worksheet, or have to repeat some kind of action in an app or web app dozens of times.
But I hate using my mouse generally. There are very few times where I want to use a mouse and having to use one, instead of being able to use the keyboard, is endlessly frustrating.
Thankfully, there are several great 'vi-style' browser extensions and there's even [Vimac](https://vimacapp.com/) for MacOS, tho I haven't tried the latter yet.
Maybe that's a bit like saying that running shoes are harmful because people with running shoes sustain running-related injuries more often than the average person, who in reality just doesn't run as much.
