For Emacs users, common wisdom is to swap control and caps. I urge you to try swapping left control with left alt instead. Thus you can use your left thumb to hit control and right thumb to hit Meta (alt). Map Esc to capslock if you use Evil-mode. Linux commands for x windows:
Great advice. Hitting modifier keys with the thumb is how Emacs is meant to be used, in my opinion. It's the strongest finger, after all.
> For Emacs users, common wisdom is to swap control and caps.
This is terrible advice and it causes so much unnecessary pain.
- The pinkie is the weakest finger.
- Stretching sideways is a terrible movement. Try it several times and compare it to moving a finger up, or curling the thumb. Stretching sideways should be reserved for infrequent actions -- hitting a modifier key is much too frequent for Emacs users.
- You should have modifier keys on BOTH sides of the keyboard. Using Emacs with just one Ctrl key is just... awkward. There are so many common keybindings (like C-x C-c) that are difficult with this scheme. With Ctrl to the left and right of the keyboard, however, I can just curl my right thumb a bit and then press x and c.
If you have RSI, maybe one of your hands is overworked (i.e. you only use Shift with one hand). Big opportunity for improvement there. Unfortunately not all modern keyboards have modifier keys on both sides of the keyboard, so you definitely have to watch out for this when e.g. buying a laptop.
With the key system you suggest, Emacs bindings are even better even than Vi modal editing, in my opinion. Pressing/lifting a thumb is much easier than changing editing modes.
Definitely agree that if you are using thumbs to execute all Emacs commands, it's just as comfortable as modal editing. Since I started using Evil a year or so ago I have become very used to it and I'm now using a strange combination of vim keybindings for text manipulation and Emacs bindings for everything else (saving files, switching buffers, etc.)
As far as sticky keys go, I'm going to pass. That's a modal change that I don't want interrupting me.
As far as Wayland goes, keyboard layouts are handled by the compositor (window manager), and have to be supported and configured by each compositor. That's probably the main design flaw that has been keeping me away from Wayland.
Edit, as another user said, everyone should probably be using sticky keys. On linux I run
on login with Xorg. Sorry, not sure how to do this under Wayland.