[preavy]

I prefer Emacs, but sometimes think Vim works better on laptops as everything is right under your fingers. Emacs is much more comfortable on a full-size keyboard. So I wonder whether there's any correlation between Emacs/desktop and Vim/laptop.

[john2x]

There was a post (or was it a comment) here a couple months ago about Emacs/Vim users and the sizes of their hands.

I have tiny hands and when I tried (still trying every now and then) to learn Emacs, I found it difficult to execute its keyboard commands. Trying it on a mechanical keyboard was even worse.

[quiesce]

I had a similar issue until getting a HHKB[1] some years ago. The extremely compact design with full-sized keys made it much easier to coax my hands into dancing through emacs' chords.

As "buy an expensive keyboard to possibly make learning emacs easier" is the advice of the mad, I would suggest that you be fearless in rebinding things. Learning the default bindings is far less important than learning the functionality of emacs and how to extend and customise it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard