Lately, I written a few posts about Emacs-induced RSI and various strategies for overcoming it. For example, my post on The Best Emacs Keyboard seemed to strike a chord with many Irreal readers. One thing that almost everyone agreed on was that being able to use your thumbs for the modifier keys is a big win and can go a long way toward remediating Emacs pinky.
One strategy for people with serious RSI problems is to adopt the Vim keybings, which largely do away with modifier keys and their attendant RSI problems. Another solution is the ergonomic, split keyboards that make modifier keys accessible with your thumbs. Some of us find it hard to warm up to either of those solutions.
Of course, if you’re working with a laptop you’re pretty much constrained to whatever fixes you can implement in software unless, like MarkB, you’re handy with 3-D printers. Over at the Emacs subreddit, awesomegayguy has a post about a keyboard that sort of splits the difference. By that, I mean that it does in hardware the sort of thing you can do by remapping Emacs keys. That has the advantage that the revised bindings are available systemwide, not just in Emacs.
There’s nothing earthshattering about this, of course, it’s just another datum in the encyclopedia of Emacs-friendly keyboards. Still, it’s a nice solution for those people who want a hardware solution but don’t want a split keyboard or any of the other nontraditional keyboards. If you’re interested in this sort of thng, take a look at awesomegayguy’s post.