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Moving the Ctrl Key

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Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#21

Post by petepete »

lizknope wrote: post #8

4 years of college on Sun workstation keyboards and then another 4 years in the late 90's at work and my hand and brain are hardwired to expect control being where caps lock is on traditional PC keyboards. In vi/vim I never hit the escape key, because the old terminals I used in high school didn't have an escape key or arrow keys. ctrl and left curly bracket is escape and h, j, k, l are to move the cursor. The muscle…

This is the main reason I use a HHKB. I'd support any other keyboard makers who put the CTRL in the right place too.

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#22

Post by ledauphin »

prash_ant wrote: post #11
ledauphin wrote: post #6

I moved Ctrl to my left thumb, on the inside of the keyboard, about ten years ago. It's still possible to hurt your thumb from overuse, but it's a far stronger finger than the pinky, and no stretching is involved.

Are you saying you moved it to the traditional left-Alt key? That makes the key on the left of the spacebar as Ctrl and the key on the right of the spacebar as Alt. This is much better, in my opinion, than using the pinky on the Capslock.

yep!

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#23

Post by bananadonkey »

ListenLinda wrote: post #12

I _believe_ remapping ctrl breaks ctrl+shift+f in VS Code. Not 100% sure.

I think you are referring to this? From the wiki at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Keybinding-Issues:

    Are you customizing keyboard mappings via setxkbmap or equivalents?
    
    symptoms: customizations done via setxkbmap or equivalents have no effect in VS Code.
    
    solution: use "keyboard.dispatch": "keyCode" in your settings and restart VS Code.

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#25

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

phoebefactorial wrote: post #20

Back in college I saw that all of my professors were suffering from varying degrees of RSI, and resolved not to succumb myself. My final changes were, in order of effectiveness: - Put Ctrl on Alt, next to the space bar. Use thumb to press. This saves a huge amount of pinky and wrist contorting. - Put Alt on Win, next to the now Ctrl key. Also use thumb to press. With both of these my pinkies have way less to do. - Pu…

just type with your index fingers

everything else is a meme

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#26

Post by pwiecz »

BeetleB wrote: post #17

I've had a lot of ergo issues from typing, and I'm always disappointed that Emacs users focus on remapping the Caps Lock key while ignoring the advice most ergonomists give: There are two Alt and Ctrl keys on the keyboard. Use both, and use both halves of the keyboard If you're doing a combination like Ctrl F, use the right control key. If you're doing Ctrl-l, use the left control key. In general, when using these mo…

Unfortunately both Alts are not equivalent. The right one, the AltGr is uaef in many languages to type letters with diacritics. E.g. in Polish AltGr+Z is Ż, while AltGr+X is Ź. Still using both Ctrls itself helps a lot, and one may have a right Windows to remap as Meta.

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#28

Post by msla »

pwiecz wrote: post #26
BeetleB wrote: post #17

I've had a lot of ergo issues from typing, and I'm always disappointed that Emacs users focus on remapping the Caps Lock key while ignoring the advice most ergonomists give: There are two Alt and Ctrl keys on the keyboard. Use both, and use both halves of the keyboard If you're doing a combination like Ctrl F, use the right control key. If you're doing Ctrl-l, use the left control key. In general, when using these mo…

Unfortunately both Alts are not equivalent. The right one, the AltGr is uaef in many languages to type letters with diacritics. E.g. in Polish AltGr+Z is Ż, while AltGr+X is Ź. Still using both Ctrls itself helps a lot, and one may have a right Windows to remap as Meta.

Another possible solution is to define a compose key (I use SysRq) to type characters not on the keyboard, such that (for example) the three-key sequence "SysRq . Z" is Ż.

Here's the XCompose file I use:

https://github.com/kragen/xcompose

Re: Moving the Ctrl Key

#30

Post by ahmedalsudani »

BeetleB wrote: post #17

I've had a lot of ergo issues from typing, and I'm always disappointed that Emacs users focus on remapping the Caps Lock key while ignoring the advice most ergonomists give: There are two Alt and Ctrl keys on the keyboard. Use both, and use both halves of the keyboard If you're doing a combination like Ctrl F, use the right control key. If you're doing Ctrl-l, use the left control key. In general, when using these mo…

Emacs is a great platform, but the default key mappings make it an RSI machine.

If I recommend Emacs to anybody today, the first thing I would tell them is to:

- enable evil mode and prefer its interface to vanilla Emacs

- install doom-emacs and learn to love the leader key instead of the C-[...] combinations

And of course what you said about moving your whole hand and using both hands still applies, including when you need to use the shift key.

I started to develop RSI once in 2015 and got my act together after that scare with an ergonomic setup and better practices. It's been smooth sailing since, always as an Emacs user.

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