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Comment by young_unixer | Hacker News Reader

Have you had RSI issues? Do you use it with the default keybindings?

I've tried it a few times but the default keybindings seem unnatural to me. Not that it's Emacs fault, considering the keyboards they used back then.

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I've been using the default keybindings for decades and never had RSI issues. The only time my wrist has started to bother me is when I use some other program that involves a lot of mouse motion.

The first time I ever had wrist issues, they were triggered by emacs and a crappy keyboard. I switched to a split keyboard, and they went away. Unfortunately it was a split keyboard with membrane keys, so the going away was only temporary.

I've since switched to a proper mechanical keyboard and all is fine with the world.

For me it was going to kinesis and trackball

Step one: remap Caps Lock to Control.

It's all about knowing the best places for modifier keys; Control next to A, Caps Lock encased in concrete at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

I learned Emacs[0] on a Symbolics "space cadet" keyboard which has all the modifier keys in the lower left corner. Maybe that's why I've never felt any need to move the control key from its lower left location on my Mac keyboard.

[0] Technically Zmacs, but most of the key bindings were the same.

HARD CORE Emacs users remap Space and Control! ;)

Where do they remap space to? I've never heard about that one.

They remap space to control, and control to space, to make it easier to enter control characters.

I've been using Emacs Evil mode for years, and I find it much better than the better defaults.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

I got painful wrists and hands when using Emacs intensively for coding. Viper mode helped but then I transitioned from development to sysadmin and did far less coding. So switched to vi because it was everywhere when Emacs wasn't.[0]

Now that Emacs is everywhere, I'm looking to going back and using evil-mode. We'll see how it goes. I find the customisation on Emacs far less hacky than vim.

[0] I used to grab tapes(!) from Uni to work and compile from source, on a fairly new / obscure architecture at the time.

For some sysadmin type things, one can use tramp to edit files/open shells on remote machines. One trick is that sshx often works better than ssh. On the other hand it doesn’t work completely flawlessly and can be slightly painful, more so in the transition between using separate terminals and ssh and vi, and using emacs with other things in separate buffers.

here's a joke:

I use emacs all the time with all the half bad wrist positions and all and have no RSI. Not even CAPS LOCK -> CTRL trick.

For a MOOC I had to suff.. use Eclipse IDE. I don't like it but I didn't mind its keybindings. The morning after I had very nasty pain in my left hand. So I quickly got back into emacs to heal that rapid onset RSI.

For a long time I was unaffected, until I started using emacs more. This was resolved by switching to an ergonomic keyboard where I put all the modifier keys on the thumbs which resolved this issue (but made single handed typing of eg C-V or single words a bit annoying)

I've done exactly this with similar results. Modifiers on the thumb cluster made a huge difference for me (and I've set up my emacs keybindings to be comfortable on my keyboard as well).

It's helped (but not completely alleviated) my RSI. Absolutely worth the price for me though given that.

I use defaults, even default control key*

*I use a macbook pro, and my thumb is used to hitting CMD-X, CMD-C, CMD-V, s what has happened is that I hit control with my thumb instead of pinky - I curl the thumb in and below my palm.

But I still love default keybindings, and what is lovely, is that many of the navigation keys are system wide on MacOS: ctrl-a, ctrl-e, etc.

Then CMD-C and CMD-V actually also work on emacs, so I sometimes use those too (I use https://emacsformacosx.com)

I have not had any RSI issues.

I have seen a video about someone who hacked up a means to use Emacs via voice control. I may play with something like that myself. I doubt that using Emacs via a keyboard is really my bottleneck, though. So any hacks in that direction may be just for fun.

You could try the Microsoft Comfort Curve 3000 keyboards. They are almost like ordinary keyboards, but the extra curving really helps with Emacs. And they're cheap.

I also have a Kinesis one that I used for some years. Those require some training.

looks like the 3000 has the same horrible reduced-size Escape and F-key row that I've had the misfortune of using on the Sculpt and others.

The older Curve 2000 series might be a better choice if you actually want to use those keys with any frequency

(And to bring it back to emacs, I find myself using ESC-ESC-ESC quite a lot when I (or it) get confused about what state things should be in)

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