Avoiding Emacs Pinky

Right after it’s too hard to learn, the second most frequent complaint about Emacs is how hard it is on your hands—especially your left pinky—because of its default keybindings. A lot of that has to do with the placement of the Ctrl and Alt keys on modern keyboards.

Sudoshred has a video that explains his system for avoiding Emacs pinky. The TL;DR is that on the Mac you should swap the left Ctrl and Alt keys. That way, you can press and hold Ctrl with your thumb and avoid stressing your fingers. Sudoshred says that since he began doing that his RSI problems have disappeared. The solution for other operating systems is similar.

He also suggests some hand stretching exercises and keeping your hands off the keyboard when you aren’t actually typing. Notice that his advice differs from the usual suggestion to swap Ctrl and Caps Lock, which is what I do.

Some of the comments claim that Emacs pinky is a made up problem harking back to older keyboards and that swapping Ctrl and Caps Lock is all you really need to do.

Some Irreal readers will beg to disagree. They say, for example, that they have to use Evil mode because of RSI problems. I take them at their word. On the other hand, I’ve been using Emacs virtually everyday, all day for almost 20 years and haven’t had any problems. And, by the way, I do everything wrong. These days, most of my tube time is on my couch with my laptop on my lap and I do keep my hands on the keyboard most of the time.

The takeaway is that I don’t know what the best method of avoiding Emacs pinky is. If you’re lucky like me it’s not a problem. If you’re like Sudoshred, a simple key swap will make the problem disappear. If you’re like many other people, you’ll have to give up the default keybinding and move to Evil mode or perhaps something like Xah Lee’s Fly Keys.