In response to my post on the best emacs keyboards, Paul Jorgensen has a very interesting post of how he leverages software to turn the standard Apple keyboards into Emacs specific keyboards and make them better suited to his needs outside of Emacs as well.
Oddly, he doesn’t have RSI problems so his changes are simply for keyboard efficiency. His post is interesting because it shows how far you can get with a standard, builtin keyboard through software.
Jorgensen uses a combination of Emacs configuration and Karabiner-Elements to customize his keyboard layout. It’s nowhere near what I’d want but that’s not the point. You can use his strategy to configure your keyboard to your requirements.
The lesson from all this is that you don’t (necessarily) need a special keyboard to make it amenable to Emacs or whatever else you’re using. Happily, I don’t require much more than mapping caps lock to Ctrl, choosing a key for Hyper, and choosing a key for Super. All that’s easily done from within Emacs and standard macOS.
All of this is significant because although there are now plenty of excellent third party keyboards available, many—or most—of us are using laptops as our main computers and often don’t have the option of using third party keyboards. Being able to use software to reconfigure our standard keyboards to our liking is a huge win.
If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at Jorgensen’s post. As I said, you don’t have to make the same choices that he did. His process will allow you to make just about any configuration possible.