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Comment by chrismonsanto | Hacker News Reader

I'm a heavy Emacs user. I tried to plan ahead and remap Ctrl -> Caps Lock, but it didn't help. After all, I still used my pinky to hit Caps Lock. Thankfully, hearty remapping of defaults + Kinesis did help!

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Maybe remap it to Vim pedal? Someone came up with the idea to use a foot pedal for vim insert mode. It was a little whacky of an idea, but perhaps it'd be more useful as Emacs' meta key.

http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/building-a-clutch-for-vim/

The Kinesis Advantage actually comes with pedals, if you want to.

I use a foot pedal mapped to Ctrl on my Kinesis (in addition to remapping Caps Lock to Ctrl). For casual use, I use the Caps Lock key; for longer typing sessions, I "bother with" the foot pedal.

My biggest problem now is that I look like an absolute clown when typing on a conference room PC (with a standard keyboard)...

You should really take advantage of those lovely left side thumb buttons on the Kinesis. I have control and meta on the two largest left thumb buttons, which works great for me.

Funny. I read your and eru's comment and thought, "no they're not!". Then I looked down and said, "Holy crap; they are!"

I may try to retrain myself, but it's been years and years of ingraining current physical patterns, so I'm not super hopeful. (It took me the better part of year to get used to the foot pedal, mostly to remember not to futz with it casually while I was just typing. Holding Control foot pedal while typing the word 'taxes' is painful in Windows apps...)

Which kinesis keyboard do you have? I've got the Advantage, and Ctrl is already activated with the thumbs by default. That helps a lot.

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