Yes, it's a good move for people using control a lot. I am using evil mode in emacs so I have the escape in the same place.
I also use homerow mods which i find really great.
With the homerow mod, the homerow keyas 'asdf' and 'jkl;' are mirrors of 'gui, alt, ctrl, shift'
So the a key is an a except of you hold it down and press another key, in that case it is the gui key.
It works really well in emacs as well as on my tiling window manager where there is a lot of use of the combinations. (I have no idea why my font appears different)
Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo Prolog, all things I got at an age when it was just a hobby in high school. In fact I can still look over at my bookshelf and see turbo prolog books.. some things you cant bring yourself to throw away!
I use SBCL, just for hobby and it does everything I want but I agree that the price is not a lot for the tool if it offers something you want for that amount.
We have got used to not paying for things and its not money we don't have, we have just spent it somewhere else because we have not had to spend it on tools but the price is not over the top - only if you have never had to pay for something.
I have used tiling wm's for a while now, on the desktop and on the laptop. I have to say its made the laptop productivity so much better and shines even better on a smaller screen IMO. Thats a combo of not just tiling but often swapping virtual desktops that is a key part of tiling wm usage.
You don't scan the screen looking for labels. You are looking directly where you want to be and a label should appear over the place you want to go. That is the label you type to jump, you will never even notice the others or scan them.
I dont have that kb, you could keep that top left key mapped to tilde and move escape somewhere else. I put escape on the caps lock as its used a lot for vim/emacsevil.
Caps lock is used a lot less so could be candidate for adding in to a layer.
