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Comment by sayemm | Hacker News Reader

Swapping caps-lock and control was one of the best decisions I made when starting on Emacs, first item on Steve Yegge's list - http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

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Only having one easily-reached Ctrl key strikes me as a bad idea. Rather than chord a left-hand key with a right-hand Ctrl, you're likely to contort your left hand to do both (I know I used to), which has gotta screw up at least your touch typing habits if not your hand.

Yup, I still have my right-hand Ctrl key on guard for my right pinky. Like the comment below, I just swapped the left-hand Ctrl key and Caps-lock, that's definitely helped me.

I actually believe that the Emacs Pinky is really a Shift Pinky: with CTRL remapped to Caps Lock, it's quite easy on my hand, because I can keep the pinky in more or less the same position (almost stretched out) most of the time. It's just when I hit the left Shift key that I have to bend the finger, and alternating between Shift and Control is what I find stressful on my Pinky.

Does anyone have similar experiences?

Exactly my experience as well

I didn't swap them, I made caps-lock an extra control key.

You can't be to thin, have too much money or enough control keys. :-)

(There is always capitalize-region. Or I can change back, if I need to write a lot of upper case, which is very unusual.)

You should probably remove being too thin from that list...

It is an idiom. (I stole the joke from an old Ernie cartoon, which added "or have too many toasters").

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