1. How often do people use 'home' and 'end' keys ? I don't, but I know quite a lot who swear by them. Do they actually increase productivity ?
2. Should caps lock be removed as a large button in the most valuable real-estate-area on the keyboard ? I literally never use it. Even when typing long ALL-CAPS sequences. I just use 'shift' instead.
3. Do you use space bars with both hands ? I only use space with the right, and IMO, it could be shorter.
I'd say, what are you coding where you don't benefit from home and end?
I use both a lot while coding, usually in conjunction with ctrl+left or ctrl+right for quickly positioning the cursor where I want it, or ctrl+home or ctrl+end to quickly go to the top or bottom respectively.
> 3. Do you use space bars with both hands ?
Yes, not often while programming, but often with other applications or games where I have right hand on the mouse.
The kind where my typing speed does not affect my output. Also, the type who doesn't use command line text editors.
I work in ML and mostly use python. Very rarely do I need to be efficient in how I navigate my documents/code, because it is rarely the bottle neck.
Lastly, all my laptops have both end/home positioned awkwardly, so I never found it quite ergonomic enough for my purposes.
But yeah, laptop, I guess that explains it. I don't use home/end any where close to as much when on a laptop. Fortunately I seldom need to use them.
I always wanted to learn to touch type but never needed it so much that it would be worth to dedicate time for learning.
I do code a lot but I am a poor dev so I spend time thinking how to do things out looking at the docs (despite coding for 30 years).
It was even more obvious when doing my thesis (physics). 70% time thinking about code, 30 actually typing
In emacs, it's just Ctrl+a and Ctrl+e to go to beginning of line and end of line respectively. Those don't involve taking my hands off the home row, so they're much faster than lifting a hand up to go hit Home or End.
This also works for most terminal emulators unless you've customized your bindings. It's really handy to go-to the beginning or end of a terminal command.
Hmm, I see jumping by words is Alt+f and Alt+b, which seems more awkward to follow up with than Ctrl+Home followed by Ctrl+Left, say. Then again, mostly depends on time spent I doing it assume.
2. Similarly since I now use a Mac more often than Windows, I just map Caps Lock to Esc. This has been particularly important due to the Esc key having been moved to the touchbar. I've gotten very used to reaching for the location of the Caps Lock key when I need to press Esc.
3. I do use space bars with both hands.
2. I've tried rebinding to escape but just got frustrated by inconsistency, so now I just leave it unused.
3. Thinking about it, I have two modes, "gaming" where my right hand is in the mouse and left on wasd, where I tend to use my left thumb for spacebar, and "working" where I have both hands on the keyboard and just use whichever is most free at that point.
1. Almost never. ^$ and Ctrl+ae fill 90% of use-cases. My Home/End and PageUp/PageDown are on a secondary layer.
2. The button itself is useful, the CL function is useless. I remapped mine to be a layer modifier (e.g. hjkl become arrow keys, and the above)
3. Training myself off it atm. I have a split keyboard where left thumb is Space, right thumb is Enter.
Layout and keyboard in my other reply [0]
2. Yes, but what should go there? One of my first steps on a new Mac is to go to keyboard/modifier keys and disable caps lock.
3. Yes, although I'm noticing that I favor my left thumb for spacebar usage. I think it's wide because of the variety of ways people use it.
The spacebar is split (the whole keyboard is actually) and all the buttons are completely configurable: remap and macros.
If you don't use home and end keys, or the left-side spacebar (or any key!) you can bind them to whatever you want.
Dear Apple, please reduce the size of the spacebar.
2. I removed the Caps Lock key from my "Das Keyboard". Kept hitting it by accident.