emacskeyboardergonomics

How do I minimize the use of same-hand keyboard fingering?


I have been trying to rid myself of the bad habit of key-chording in Emacs using only one hand. That is, for C-x I want to use my right pinky to hit the right-Ctrl and a left-hand finger to hit x. My question is how do I type efficiently in all caps? For example, when I type an environment variable such as RAILS_ENV=test it's very tedious to switch between left and right hands holding Shift every time the key falls on the opposite side of the keyboard. It would seem that this is an ideal case for using CapsLk, but I've long remapped that key to Ctrl because of the scarcity of its use and potential for accidental triggering.

I found this related question but it deals more with enforcing the habit than the question of how to actually type efficiently using the opposite hand to hit modifier keys.


Solution

  • As the question appears to be targeted towards bash command lines, you can use Control-A Meta-U to capitalize the first word of the line, useful for typing

    env_var=value some_command ...
    

    prior to converting it to

    ENV_VAR=value some_command ...