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Comment by unknownzero | Hacker News Reader

I've always been an emacs user but have only recently gotten serious about customizing it to replace other applications I normally use. If anyone has bought this and at least skimmed through I'd love to hear your thoughts before I drop $35.99 to see for myself.

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If Mastering Emacs isn't the right book for your situation, you might consider purchasing a hardcopy of the Emacs Manual:

http://shop.fsf.org/category/books/

As a bonus, you'd be supporting the Free Software Foundation with your purchase.

If you want to start heavy customization you can start by looking at configurations in literate programming style, you will learn a lot of documented customs.

Here is an exemple : https://github.com/vdemeester/emacs-config

Also about the book someone on #emacs said it's mostly tips for beginners and about 14 more for intermediate users. I'll suggest you to read the website first and see if you like the author style/pov

Thanks for the info :) I did enjoy the posts I read on the site, but was hoping for more advanced material in the book, good to know. Browsing through that repository right now, awesome stuff, I'll have to look for more like this.

Swap your CTRL and caps lock keys. It will make it a lot easier to use.

If emacs expects 3 modifier keys, and emacs is wildly popular with programmers, then why hasn't someone made a keyboard with the windows key renamed and remapped to the missing meta key?

I feel like if there was a "One True Emacs Keyboard", it would probably be something like http://mykeyboard.co.uk/microswitch/

Look up HHKB, that is what the best emacs users I know prefer to use.

I do use that remapping with a Kinesis keyboard.

you mean like this?

http://i.imgur.com/evUJkAv.jpg

Meta is Alt.

Nope, don't do that. Learn to proper touch-type instead. Use your palms to press the ctrl keys. See: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html .

You can then use Ctrl+m instead of Enter at the command line, as well. Save both pinkies from the extra effort.

Using your palms to press the ctrl keys is only seriously possible on some curved keyboards. Everyone else, who prefers to touch keys with their fingers, like they were meant to, is going to do the sensible stuff and put the more frequently used modifier in the more easily-reachable place.

All this press-ctrl-with-your-palms fad is a problem solved in the wrong place.

And I have to say I dislike the tone of that page, too:

> Swapped but never had a problem [...] > Because you don't actually type that much.

Right.

> All this press-ctrl-with-your-palms fad is a problem solved in the wrong place.

Total agreement from me, I consign this piece of advice to the same trash pile as !!NEVER USE ARROW KEYS!! ... cargo-culting nonsense.

> Using your palms to press the ctrl keys is only seriously possible on some curved keyboards.

It feels fine to me on my flat keyboard with low-profile keys.

I used to use my pinky to press ctrl. Then I briefly remapped to caps-lock, but that felt awkward to use together with the shift key (but I didn't use it enough to get truly used to it). Then I switched to using my palm, and then finally to using god-mode which means that I don't have to use modifier keys as much anymore (though I still use it sometimes, and I still press ctrl just as much in non-emacs applications like terminals and Firefox).

A keyboard with symmetrically placed C and M keys is another piece of Xah Lee's sound advice: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html

I've been using the MicroSoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 for several years and it has improved my touch for M and C. Recently, I've been applying that on my ThinkPad [chosen because of the symmetric layout] and am removing some additional bad habits related to left-C right-C.

I've seen these arguments before, but find them very unconvincing. I've no idea how I'm supposed to comfortably press ctrl with my palm, the issues with 'now hotkeys are in bad places' are resolved by just not having capslock at all (although I don't actually have any difficulty pressing anything either way), and the pinky load/awkwardness just doesn't seem that important to me, I don't think the keyboard is particularly well calibrated to use the pinkys appropriately anyway.

I'm happy for some people to find these things important and type differently, but what is the evidence that it is actively wrong to bind caps-lock as ctrl?

Edit: There are a lot of good points in these pages and I appreciate that the author has made many customisations in pursuit of an ideal layout, and the principle of sharing load between hands equally is a good one. It's just that I'm quite unconvinced that having capslock act as ctrl is a terrible thing, especially compared to many other changes that can be made even on a normal keyboard layout.

Palm/ctrl won't work on most laptops, especially since nearly all of them have chiclet keys these days.. heck, more and more desktop keyboards do too.

Remapping capslock to ctrl on all my machines turned out to be one of the best things I have ever done. It helps me with far more than emacs.

Also, Ctrl+j works as 'enter' as well.

A decent subset of emacs keybindings work in anything that uses gnu readline or similar library (ctrl+a|b|f... etc).

No, swap your alt-gr and ctrl.

Put Ctrl on left Alt. And left Alt und right Alt (Alt-Gr). Then you are free to finally map Caps Lock to Escape. After that map left Ctrl such that left Ctrl+E/S/D/F is Up, Left, Down and Right.

I map esc to the key between left shift and Z. It doesn't exist on US keyboards, though. And I put backspace on caps-lock. What I don't understand is putting any kind of simultaneous combo key on caps-lock, since caps-lock + a is not really easy to press. It doesn't help that many keyboards have a bit of a gap between a and caps-lock (to help position the left hand and prevent accidental caps-locking?).

I guess this is if you use your pinky to hold down CTRL? I try to mostly use the knuckle below my pinky fingers[1] to hold down CTRL. This can be harder on certain keyboards, and I guess especially laptop keyboards. I think I learnt this from some kind of ErgoEmacs article/webpage.

I also use god-mode, and one of the tips is to swap ESC with CAPS-LOCK (ESC is used to toggle god-mode).

Nonetheless, I guess most of us can agree that CAPS-LOCK is in a too convenient position compared to its normal utility. :p

[1] I use my left hand to hold down CTRL when it's more comfortable to press the next key with my right hand (like in C-u), and vice versa.

Yes, that was from ErgoEmacs. Very nice info in there.

I've just bought and skimmed it. In my opinion it looks like a good introduction to emacs and its included packages for new users but it does not really discuss customization in detail. I really like the chapter "Theory of Movement" which discusses editing commands.

Thanks for the heads up. I really liked the blog posts I just read through but I think I'll avoid making a purchase in that case.

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