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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

it now looks like this: http://images.apple.com/keyboard/images/gallery/wired_1_2007...

As an Emacs user, it's one of the things I look for when I buy a laptop. Right now the right ctrl key on my HP laptop is directly underneath the slash key, and the left ctrl key is mapped to caps lock, so both my pinkies only have to move slightly.

For the Mac users, how are you guys dealing with this? I've used 10.4 and the re-mapping feature in the preferences panel seems fairly limited.

Same thing I've always done, on every platform: make sure the key to the left of A is mapped to control, and only use that. Even when I'm on a keyboard with 3 control keys, I only ever use the one.

I don't think any laptop has a good key layout. Just pick one and try to get used to it.

I only use the left Control key, and I remapped Caps Lock to Control in the Mac OS preferences panel. Works very well for me.

I don't have any problem with the control key position, I just swap it with caps lock.

The real pain for me is the meta key mapping. If I'm using Carbon Emacs I use one mapping, if I'm using emacs in a terminal I have to switch to another mapping. Things work a little differently with my external keyboard v.s. the built in one. I find the whole thing really irritating, almost enough to make me switch back to Linux on my laptop.

Anyway, I use http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/ to map keys that aren't handled by the limited built-in mapping choices.

Thanks for the link. I thought it was just me going crazy with Emacs/Apple keyboard bindings.

I do the Capslock/Ctrl swap, but I really want to make the Apple key my meta command, since that's the location of the Alt button on every other keyboard I've used

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