{"id":11038,"date":"2022-12-26T13:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11038"},"modified":"2022-12-26T13:12:00","modified_gmt":"2022-12-26T18:12:00","slug":"why-emacs-keys-are-so-unergonomic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11038","title":{"rendered":"Why Emacs Keys Are So Unergonomic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a blast from the past that I recently came across again. It\u2019s Xah Lee\u2019s post on Why Emacs Keys are Painful<\/a>. Lee, as most of you probably know, is obsessed with keyboard ergonomics and it is fair, I think, to consider him an expert on the matter. His post considers the question of why\u2014given how painful they can be\u2014Emacs shortcuts are the way they are.<\/p>\n

The answer, he says, is pretty simple. First, and probably most important, when Emacs was designed, the implementors were using various Lisp keyboards<\/a> that mostly had the Ctrl<\/kbd> key to the left of the space key and the Meta<\/kbd> key to the left of Ctrl<\/kbd>. Modern keyboards, of course, have those two keys reversed making Emacs shortcuts less ergonomic.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the common shortcuts were chosen to be mnemonic rather than ergonomic. Emacs has so many shortcuts that even with the mnemonic choice they\u2019re hard to remember so it\u2019s not clear it was a bad tradeoff. Except for RSI.<\/p>\n

Many Emacs users have developed cases of RSI so bad that they\u2019ve moved to Evil mode for relief. Sometimes this was after years of using the conventional keybindings. I\u2019ve been lucky in that respect. Even though I came from Vi(m), I\u2019ve been using the standard shortcuts for over 15 years without ill effect. But others haven\u2019t been as fortunate so the ergonomics of the bindings is definitely not a trivial complaint.<\/p>\n

Of course, in this as in other things, Emacs has you covered. Lee, for example, has his
\nown set of bindings developed along ergonomic lines<\/a>. And if reaching for the Ctrl<\/kbd> and Meta<\/kbd> keys is painful for you, there\u2019s always evil mode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a blast from the past that I recently came across again. It\u2019s Xah Lee\u2019s post on Why Emacs Keys are Painful. Lee, as most of you probably know, is obsessed with keyboard ergonomics and it is fair, I think, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-11038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11039,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11038\/revisions\/11039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}