Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The first thing i do on any new system is to rebind Caps_Lock to be a duplicate L_Ctrl.

this solves 90% of my ergo issues/pinkie pain, and not just for emacs use.

Vim user here. I've mapped Caps_Lock in such a way that a tap imitates Esc(to quickly switch modes) and long press imitates Ctrl(to use some good insert mode features).

Yeah. That's what everyone does. The other common modification is to put an Alt/Meta on whatever key is below the shift key (which varies by keyboard design), so Meta is always available from the other pinky.

(In other universes, some users will also do this trick so they can hit ESC with a Ctrl-[ chord that is available from the home row. But I never understood why they were reaching for ESC in the first place.)

Yet this article appears not to know about or care about this overwhelmingly pervasive convention that fixes all the problems it's talking about?! Skip.

After using a Mac for a while, I realize how easy the cmd key combinations are to press. They are easier than the ctrl key combinations.

I think it would be useful for Emacs to swap cmd and ctrl.

Actually, let me set ns-alternate-modifier, ns-command-modifier and ns-control-modifier, and see what happens. It sure takes some getting used to!

Cmd key combinations are one of the things that keep me coming back to macOS. Far more ergonomic than ctrl and just requires you to move your thumb (which typically would hover over cmd key anyway). It’s one of those things Apple did right back in the day.

That's precisely what this article is pointing out (though it's flawed in other ways). Apple put the Cmd key where Symbolics had a Ctrl.

    (setq mac-command-modifier 'control)

When I'm not on a laptop (on which I, too, remap CTRL to CAPS), I use a Kinesis Advantage 2 and remap (in hardware) the bottom-most row so my pinky is CMD / SUPER and my ring finger is META, and CTRL is on my middle finger , so all I have to do is go straight down to hit it, and this has eliminated the most of my problems. However, I also use Dvorak, so that plays into it a little.

I do the same thing in vim with Esc <-> CapsLock

If you've a sufficiently decent input manager or a programmable keyboard, you can have Caps Lock play double duty as both. I am an emacs and evil user, so I have tapping caps configured to send ^] and holding it to ^. Best of both worlds!

It was almost life-changing when I figured out how to do that on both my work Macbook and my home Linux machine. As another evil mode user I second what you said

I use a Mac, and it sounds like an interesting feature to have. How to do it?

I use Karabiner https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ and then used one of the Caps lock modifiers in https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...

Another possibility is to not use the ESC key in vim. ESC just sends CTRL-[, and with your hands in normal position on the keyboard, CTRL-[ is fast and easy to type.

With CTRL mapped to directly left of the left pinky (the CAPS LOCK position on most keyboards), then an ESC via CTRL-[ is just a slight pinky movement on both hands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com