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by yadakhov 4096 days ago
My pinky starts hurting when I hear emacs.
8 comments

I used to have that. A couple tweaks made my experience much better:

1. Remap Caps Lock to Control and press it with my ring finger rather than my pinkie when possible (e.g C-a, C-s, C-d). I still use my pinkie for C-g or C-r, but diminishing the number of times it is used was very helpful

2. Map more keybindings to use Alt rather than Control.

I've been using Emacs keybindings for a really long time now, but I think I could be convinced to try the Ergo Emacs keybindings. My only worry is that my keyboard is French Canadian (with dead keys), so I'd probably need to first start by remapping a bunch of shortcuts.

Since converting to the faith (cult?), I've re-mapped capslock to ctrl on every computer I've owned. Results? Blazingly fast operator on my own machines. Stumbling idiot that's constantly turning on capslock on everyone else's machine :/
BTW, wanted to add...

A little surprised you've remapped capslock to ctrl, but also remap keybindings to alt. IMHO, alt is more of a stumbling block than control, because you pretty much have to take a hand off of the home row to use it. I find pressing capslock with the pinky not to be a problem, and if anything, have really appreciated a Steve Yegge tip of binding C-x, C-m to M-x (as well as C-x-m, for ultra laziness.)

I've been using Emacs for years with a Happy Hacking Pro 2 keyboard (where what is normally caps-lock is control) and never had any kind of "Emacs pinky" issue. Remapping caps-lock to control is a must!
Caps as Ctrl is good, but a keyboard that puts Ctrl on the thumbs is far better, especially for Emacs.
You mean like the Atreus? ;)

(I'm quite keen to try it some day! Love your work in the Emacs community by the way.)

My eyes start to cross when I hear vim.
Don't use a finger to press control. Use the pad of your hand.
Doesn't work on laptops with flat keys :-)
Remap Caps Lock to control. You can even do this in MacOS.
Just map Alt-Gr to control
If 'emacs pinky' is an issue, then you need to work on your google-fu. A cursory look will show you 1001 ways of remapping control to caps lock and other alternatives.