Emacs Pinky

Hitting Control so much your pinky hurts.

One solution is to RemapCapsLock.

Never suffered from it myself, but I've noticed what I do. Back when I was using an IBM Model M keyboard, I developed a trick of rolling my hand slightly to press Control with the left side of my hand below the pinky, sort of like using the outside edge of the muscle you'd use to palm a coin.

These days, on my laptop, I tend to quickly curl my pinky and use the knuckle. My pinky doesn't hurt, but the writing on the left CTRL key of every keyboard I use has rubbed off.

sounds like a good idea - going to try doing that and see what its like (31 may 2005)

6/1/2005 Repetitive extreme pinky movements caused me wrist pain when learning emacs (For example, using many meta-backslashes to remove indents) Using Caps Lock made the left hand better, and moving the more important keys on the right side closer helped the right hand. One thing is the left pinky is for ctrl and right pinky is for meta.

My key assignments

Saves your left pinky:

caps lock key - left ctrl

Saves your right pinky:

[ key - delete
] key - insert
' key - meta
; key - enter
/ key - ' (moved to make meta closer and symmetrical with ctrl)

A symmetrical keyboard is also helpful:

left pinky tab to backspace, right pinky [ to delete
tab key - backspace
left pinky tilde to backslash, right pinky backspace to forwardslash
tilde key - \
backspace key - /
left pinky caps lock to ctrl, right pinky ' to meta

Not used often for me, remap closer if necessary:

left ctrl key - caps lock
delete key - [
insert key - ]
ENTER key - ; (Takes some getting used to, need other keys closer though)
\ key - tab (Prefer two-space indents)
right ctrl key - tilde

There is a program called KeyTweak that will modify the windows registry for key reassignments. A Kensington ComfortType? also helps (diagonal key shapes)

JuneZeroFive (but activity probably due to link on http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/30/1719252&tid=222&tid=227)