[krylon]

Many years ago, I came across the term "emacs pinky". I thought it was joke, until I got a job as a programmer where I was lucky enough to have free choice of editor, so emacs it was.

My memory is a little hazy on the "when", but I think some 6-12 months after starting at that company, I noticed my left pinky did indeed kind of hurt. Reaching for that Ctrl-key on the far, far left front of the keyboard was getting a nuisance. The "emacs pinky" was real!

I did a bit of research on the Internet and found a piece of text that said, Ctrl used to be where CAPS LOCK lives now, oh, and here's how to make your CAPS LOCK into an additional Ctrl key (I cannot remember a single time I used CAPS LOCK, so I did not exactly miss it). I made the change and found it more comfortable right away.

To this day, the first thing I do on a new computer I am going to use for longer than, say, a week, is to make that little change. My pinky has not had any problems since.

[FullyFunctional]

Indeed, the Emacs pinky got me started on a life-long interest in [ergonomic] keyboards. The best solution I have found so far is the Kinesis Advantage where Control is moved from the weakest finger (pinky) to the strongest (Thumb). I also swapped delete and Alt (Meta) so the thumb is use for Meta as well. Fixed all my problems!

Incidentally I _also_ switched to Dvorak too, but only for that keyboard. Works great because muscle memory "feels" the keyboard is different and uses the correct layout without cognitive overhead.

EDIT: typo

[dragandj]

Move shift to spacebar (use spacebar for spaces also) and you're all set!

[vlunkr]

I've started using my palm/the left side of my hand to press ctrl and it works really well, provided you are working on a keyboard with raised keys, not so easy on a laptop.