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Question to the Emacs crowd: how do I hit Alt comfortably? My instinct is to use my left ring finger, but have trouble doing that without moving my other fingers much. Could it be because I have very large hands (or because my keyboard sucks)? Is it a good idea to just remap capslock to be the meta key?

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The control key is used more often than the meta key, so I'd reserve that choice bit of keyboard real estate (caps-lock) for control. For meta you can hit Esc, or even easier Ctrl+[ which is the same thing. Contorting your hand to hit control and alt in their default locations is going to cause you pain, so don't do it.

I now use a kinesis keyboard, which has two giant thumb keys for your left hand, I use those for control and meta. Before that I used control at caps-lock and meta using Ctrl+[, which worked well and pain-free for me for years.

I use my thumb.

Though I replaced my CAPSLOCK with CTRL and I mapped C-x C-m and C-c C-m to be equivalent to M-x. This dramatically reduce my usage of Alt.

I tend to use my left thumb. Seems to be close enough on PC and Mac keyboards that muscle memory works fine.

On OSX I have Meta bound to the Apple key.

What also helped is a tip borrowed from Steve Yegge [1] to bind C-x C-m to M-x (also C-c C-m, in case you miss the x). This avoids my most common use of Meta, allowing me to use the more comfortable Control (bound to Caps Lock).

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

Having two control keys is really useful because then you can alternate hands. My layout looks like this:

[super] - [left meta] - [left control] - [space] - [right control] - [right meta]

Having control and meta right next to each other also makes C-M-* combinations easier to reach.

I just realized that I use my thumb for that.

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