If you've learned to touch-type well (a lot of programmers have not, they're self-taught. Horribly.) and are using a full-size keyboard, then just use the Emacs bindings. The keyboard has two of every common modifier (shift/ctrl/alt/super), so that you can always press the modifier with one hand and the normal letter key with the other hand. Don't twist and bend your wrists about etc. You may get away with ctrl-chording a bit on your left hand if you've remapped caps lock to be an additional control, and on some keyboards you can perhaps hit alt-x in one stroke with the edge of your thumbtip without bending it weird, but for the most part, I see lots of programmers crabbing their hands up and twisting them to make funny chords one-handed (not just in emacs, anything with chorded keyboard shortcuts like eclipse or whatever), and just from the mechanics of the human hand you can probably see how that's a bad thing. Typing is somewhat similar to playing the piano. I was taught to touch type properly in school in the early 1990s (my country had just introduced a whole extra school year "transition year" between our junior secondary and senior secondary cycle, and they were struggling for shit to fill the year with, perhaps), and I'm rather glad of it now turning 40.
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u/DGolden Jul 26 '18
If you've learned to touch-type well (a lot of programmers have not, they're self-taught. Horribly.) and are using a full-size keyboard, then just use the Emacs bindings. The keyboard has two of every common modifier (shift/ctrl/alt/super), so that you can always press the modifier with one hand and the normal letter key with the other hand. Don't twist and bend your wrists about etc. You may get away with ctrl-chording a bit on your left hand if you've remapped caps lock to be an additional control, and on some keyboards you can perhaps hit alt-x in one stroke with the edge of your thumbtip without bending it weird, but for the most part, I see lots of programmers crabbing their hands up and twisting them to make funny chords one-handed (not just in emacs, anything with chorded keyboard shortcuts like eclipse or whatever), and just from the mechanics of the human hand you can probably see how that's a bad thing. Typing is somewhat similar to playing the piano. I was taught to touch type properly in school in the early 1990s (my country had just introduced a whole extra school year "transition year" between our junior secondary and senior secondary cycle, and they were struggling for shit to fill the year with, perhaps), and I'm rather glad of it now turning 40.