Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

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> You are meant to press Ctrl with your right hand when you press C-x.

I've been using Emacs for several years now, and I think the real solution is to turn Caps Lock into another Ctrl.

The right Ctrl key is in a very uncomfortable position whether I press it with my pinky or with the base of my hand, so in practice I basically never use it. The left Ctrl key is not as bad, but it's still not comfortable if I need to press it often. Caps Lock, however, only requires a slight adjustment of my left pinky finger to press. Simultaneously pressing x with my left ring finger is slightly weird, but not uncomfortable. There are some other keys on the left side that don't really comfortably combine with left Ctrl or Caps Lock, but I don't run into them often enough for it to be a problem.

I use Kinesis Advantage 2, and have been doing so for about 10 years now. So it's hard for me to relate. But, in a rare event that I need to use a more conventional keyboard, I press right Ctrl with my thumb.

In the beginning of my exposure to Emacs I did rebind CapsLock, but that offered little relief. The true quality of life improvement comes from not pressing Ctrl+<anything> with the same hand. Anything that requires Meta or Ctrl -- automatically use both hands.

> The right Ctrl key is in a very uncomfortable position whether I press it with my pinky or with the base of my hand

When I used a traditional keyboard I rebound ctrl to be next to space so I could easily hit it with my thumb so the layout was like:

    [super][alt][ctrl][----space----][ctrl][alt][super]

But now I use a split keyboard(Kinesis Advantage) with ctrl/alt/super in thumb clusters that make hitting those modifiers really easy.

Yep. I do that same key remapping too. IIRC original suggestion was from Xah Lee

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