Over at the Emacs subreddit, SecretTraining4082 asks long term vanilla Emacs users how their hands are holding up. You’d be forgiven if you think the answer is “terrible”. After all, it’s received wisdom that Emacs’ default key bindings are particularly hard on your hands and inevitably lead to Emacs pinkie or some other form of RSI. Certainly there are serious and well informed people like Eric Fraga who say that RSI caused them to move to Evil mode.
I’ve always taken these people at their word, of course, but, even more, have generalized their experience to the larger Emacs user population, even though I have never suffered from any RSI problems despite years of Emacs use and even more years of constant keyboard use.
I was, therefore, a bit surprised at the answers to SecretTraining4082’s question. Almost every responder said that they didn’t suffer any significant RSI problems despite years of vanilla Emacs use. Many of them attributed this to turning the Caps Lock key into another Ctrl key. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember—long before I was an Emacs user—so perhaps that helps explain my lack of RSI problems.
Some of the commenters recommended the usual things like split/ergonomic keyboards but it’s surprising how many said they have been using vanilla Emacs for 30 or 40 years without any problems and without doing anything special other than making Caps Lock into another Ctrl key.
There are, for sure, people who do suffer RSI problems from the default Emacs keybindings but I was surprised at the number of people who said they didn’t. It appears that the idea that Emacs keybindings inevitably lead to RSI may be another trope used by Emacs haters to justify their animus.