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Comment by abhiyerra | Hacker News Reader

I've used Emacs for about 8 years now and before that I used vim. I think Emacs in Evil mode is the best. Emacs default keybindings were giving me the Emacs pinky.

Then again nowadays I am trying to be pragmatic with editors and more get things done. It is easy to go into endless customization in Emacs where you don't actually solve any real problems. (i.e I once used elnode https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode to build and host a website... great little project that took way too much time better used elsewhere.)

Nowadays I basically do VSCode for many things and jump onto Emacs if VSCode can't do it. Still using vim bindings though.

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A classic trick to avoid Emacs pinky is swapping Caps Lock and Ctrl. I'm using it everywhere though; swapcaps makes it much more comfortable to use the Ctrl key on a standard PC keyboard.

With the placement of the Control key on most keyboards, your pinkie is doing a straight downwards motion which is much less straining than going sideways, even if it is a bit of a long stretch. Most keyboards (maybe not on laptops though) also have two Control keys so the load is distributed over two pinkies instead of one and neither hand makes any crazy stretches. Personally, I think Caps Lock as Control is categorically terrible advice. I'm sure your intentions were good, but I wouldn't be surprised if this classic trick wasn't originally some vile Vim scheme designed to undermine Emacs users.

Ideal would be to use a keyboard and OS (MacBooks have both) where you can map Control to the keys immediately next to the spacebar. Using the strongest finger (thumb) instead of the weakest finger and the strongest movement (thumb curl) rather than the weakest is a true upgrade.

> With the placement of the Control key on most keyboards, your pinkie is doing a straight downwards motion

On every keyboard I have in my apartment, and every keyboard I've used for a long time, moving my left pinky straight down with my hands on the home row hits left shift and the windows key, in that order. Hitting caps lock with my left pinky is barely a movement at all.

Caps-lock is an abomination. I used to try remapping it to something useful, or disabling it in software with autohotkey or the like, but that was not sufficiently foolproof, so I've given up and just rip the keycap off my keyboards. Looks a little trashy, but it works fantastic.

Another approach is to hit Control in its default corner location with the bone below the pinky (fifth metacarpal) instead of the pinky itself. It's definitely a little awkward at first, but works better than you might expect after a little bit of practice. Probably not very viable for most laptop keyboards, though.

Truly hardcore modifier wizards (or people recovering from injury) have been known to use pedals.

I hit Control with the last finger joint before the nail, pinky curled. I don't know how it happened but that's how it is now.

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