Here’s a blast from the past that I recently came across again. It’s Xah Lee’s post on Why Emacs Keys are Painful. Lee, as most of you probably know, is obsessed with keyboard ergonomics and it is fair, I think, to consider him an expert on the matter. His post considers the question of why—given how painful they can be—Emacs shortcuts are the way they are.
The answer, he says, is pretty simple. First, and probably most important, when Emacs was designed, the implementors were using various Lisp keyboards that mostly had the Ctrl key to the left of the space key and the Meta key to the left of Ctrl. Modern keyboards, of course, have those two keys reversed making Emacs shortcuts less ergonomic.
Secondly, the common shortcuts were chosen to be mnemonic rather than ergonomic. Emacs has so many shortcuts that even with the mnemonic choice they’re hard to remember so it’s not clear it was a bad tradeoff. Except for RSI.
Many Emacs users have developed cases of RSI so bad that they’ve moved to Evil mode for relief. Sometimes this was after years of using the conventional keybindings. I’ve been lucky in that respect. Even though I came from Vi(m), I’ve been using the standard shortcuts for over 15 years without ill effect. But others haven’t been as fortunate so the ergonomics of the bindings is definitely not a trivial complaint.
Of course, in this as in other things, Emacs has you covered. Lee, for example, has his
own set of bindings developed along ergonomic lines. And if reaching for the Ctrl and Meta keys is painful for you, there’s always evil mode.