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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

I used Emacs for everything, until I got chronic pain in my left pinky and went back to "traditional" editors. I've been willing to give it a go again in cua-mode, but couldn't find the time yet.

And yes, I have tried to replace left-ctrl with capslock, but it was annoying as well.

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You can use emacs with vim-keys or any other config you like.

I never used the built in keys for cursor movement (I use the arrow keys), buffer switching (I define my own more efficient key), etc.

Yeah, but I used a lot of different modes and the configs were annoying to port.

For example, there wasn't a generic "run the code in this buffer" command for me to map. I'd have to map all the run-foo command for all languages.

I maintain a somewhat extensive Emacs config, and I've kept a lot of the default key commands. I find them incredibly ergonomic, and as a bonus you'll find it's the default in most terminals.

I use the side of my palm for C, it doesn't take long to get used to and allows you to keep your fingers on the home row. Obviously this transfers to CUA or any other standard/config that utilizes C.

Do you use a laptop keyboard? Pressing control with the left side of the left palm is just so natural I don't understand why people even use their pinkies, I think I started doing that even before using emacs.

Curling the pinkie and using the knuckle instead of the tip also works well for me. In fact I do this for both M and C.

Why not use right-ctrl in combination with keys on the left hand side? If the answer is "because there is no right-ctrl", that can be changed.

Swap control and alt so that you can hit Control with your thumb. The thumb is much stronger than the pinky.

I am very interested in this particular use case. What turned out to be annoying about it?

Well, it wasn't that much annoying, but I would sometimes have to use other people's (customer's) computers and I kept pressing Capslock hoping it would be Ctrl like an idiot :)

Besides that, can't remember if it was on Linux or Windows, but there was an input lag when using Capslock as Ctrl. I had to wait like 1s for it to register. Mostly unusable, and I used both systems a lot at the time.

Yeah, relying on that when you use foreign keyboards makes life difficult. I take an in-between approach and redefine just a couple of keys such that I can get away with just few lines of config.

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