T V Raman has a post that may be interesting to those of you who run Emacs under X. That’s probably just about everybody who isn’t using a Mac so many of you may be interested. The TL;DR is that his method turns the modifier keys into what he calls buttons. For example, (with his setup) pressing (just) the Ctrl key will send Ctrl+e to Emacs.
His keyboard has three modifier keys on each side of Space and adding the two Shift keys gives him eight possible “buttons”.
The key to making this work is the xcape command in the Xorg keyboard configuration to define what each of the buttons produce. Raman links to his xcape and XModmap configurations so you can see how he set things up but you’ll probably prefer other mappings.
The advantage of Raman’s method is two fold:
- It avoids chording for commonly use commands.
- It gives you several (8 in Raman’s case) extra keys to do something useful with.
If you’re an X user and interested in improving your keyboard ergonomics or perhaps just gaining some useful shortcut keys, take a look at Raman’s post. If you’re not afraid of modifying your XModmap file it’s not hard to set up.
UPDATE : Added link to Raman’s post.