Emacs and RSI?

Can any other Emacs users comment on this... I started using emacs around this summer because I started studying Scheme a little. Now I'm using it full time especially after discovering org mode.
Lately I've been having pain in my left hand thumb and pinky. No so much in my right hand. Any one else have RSI type problem with emacs?
I think I'll switch back to vim for a while and see if it clears up. yes i know about evil. I just want to see what and how much I'll miss

Other urls found in this thread:

ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html
github.com/atlas-engineer/next
ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html
ergoemacs.org/misc/rms_emacs_tyrant_2018-03.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

RSI is purely psychological. Please send me all the money you'll spend on useless widgets, doctors etc. Thanks.

Well being that the only money I'm going to spend is in switching back to vim or installing evil I'll send you a grand total of $0.
Where to send?

If you're using Emacs with the default ctrl position on a PC keyboard, you'll become a cripple. Bind that shit to caps lock.
Your pinky isn't designed to always be thrusting at 120deg + 90deg angles away from the rest of your fingers. Use it very sparingly.

xcape
github.com/alols/xcape

This. I use the CTRL key in Vim very often as well (in insert mode) and rebinding the useless Caps Lock is a life saver. That position is also where the CTRL key used to be when vi was originally designed.

Swap caps-lock with control:setxkbmap -option caps:ctrl_modifier
Place this on your .xinitrc or equivalent. Alternatively, use the right ctrl more, it takes some time to get used.

Nope. As a gaymer my hands have adapted to contort into any position that's needed. Maybe you need to start using an emacs pedal.

Use evil mode

This is the keyboard Emacs was design for. Notice the position of CTRL.
Either swap Ctrl and Alt or Ctrl and CapsLock.

Attached: ClipboardImage.png (2001x773, 2.33M)

Alt is Ctrl, Win/Super is Alt, and Ctrl is Win/Super.
remove mod1 = Alt_Lremove mod4 = Super_Lremove control = Control_Ladd mod1 = Super_Ladd control = Alt_Ladd mod4 = Control_L

Yep. When I was a child and I got my first computer, an Apple IIgs, the control key on the keyboard was where an IBM PC caps lock is. I always thought that was fucking retarded, who even uses caps lock?

oh baby that space cadet board, but it's so retarded in its way, the absolute state of the cursor keys and the roman numeral keys, lol

There is the occasional time I need to type ALL_CAPS, but I have simply mapped it so that pressing both Shift keys at the same time acts as Caps Lock. It's much harder to press by accident, and it leaves the physical Caps Lock key to be remapped to something useful (e.g. CTRL). Pressing both Shift keys is a bit less convenient, but considering how rarely I use it, the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Did consider giving Xah's ergo emacs bindings a try?

Attached: ErgoEmacs_mascot.png (720x591, 137.57K)

Tell that to my nerve conduction study retard

user people who are catatonic do not respond to stimulus. When they are tapped on the knee they do not react.
Do you think their knee nerve is damaged?

Purely psychological, yes.

Attached: 1512072882001.jpg (940x528, 134.64K)

Chording is pretty stressful, compared to modal style editor like vi. If you're going to continue using emacs, better start using the vi keybindings add-on, whatever it's called. You can swap CapsLock and Escape key, to make it more comfy. Here's .Xmodmap entry:
remove Lock = Caps_Lockkeysym Escape = Caps_Lockkeysym Caps_Lock = Escapeadd Lock = Caps_Lock
In the tty console, it depends on the OS, but here's wsconsctl.conf for OpenBSD:
keyboard.map+="keysym Caps_Lock = Escape"
Also set your keyboard repeat delays to whatever is the least stressful for you. You'll have to experiment.
Take lots of typing breaks, and look into ergonomic keyboards. Your body is giving you warning signs of damage. Ignore them at your peril.

Better yet, Spacemacs.

Or even better, just use God-mode.

no, it's just you. remap caps lock -> control, or something?


no, spacemacs is terrible. it's better to just use gnu emacs as it has been around for a long time and it won't just become discontinued, unlike meme distributions of emacs, like spacemacs,.

choose one

All I can say is type properly.

Move your whole hand to press control with the bone at the base of your pinky. This is very comfortable and fast once you're used to the position.
Control on caps lock is a bad idea, it makes some keys hard to press and isn't symmetrical. You should always be using the modifier on the other side of the keyboard from the modifiee. If you're one of those people who doesn't use right shift, start now.

You're a fucking retard.

I can type all day with this method and have never experienced any discomfort.
It's also preferred by the great Emacs autist.
ergoemacs.org/emacs/swap_CapsLock_Ctrl.html

You would be amazed at the amount of people that complain about keyboard layouts or bindings but can't actually touch type. That seems like a prerequisite before one can start making a proper critique.

see how retarded you sound?

I didn't say nobody, I said you'd be surprised how many can't.

that was me until I learned Dvorak.
Easiest way to learn Dvorak was to do typing exercises according to a guide online. The most natural way to do those exercises was to type properly. Before that I had a completely ad-hoc style, 100+WPM but born of just needing to type fast in online games kids these days with their always-on mics
Dvorak sucks but it cured me of the painful way I used to type.
Just, uh, be prepared to have your qwerty muscle memory physically overwritten. Maybe get some qwerty typing exercises prepared, for after you're comfortable with dvorak.

Easiest way to learn Dvorak is to not learn Dvorak.

What about evil mode?


what?

For a moment, I read "Emacs and RSSI" and thought that Emacs now also incorporates a WLAN client.

Did someone try next browser (web kit gtk+)? github.com/atlas-engineer/next
It seems to be functional, but very early in development.

not entirely unreasonable

I started learning Colemak for a solid 2 weeks it hurt my pinkys. So I went back to qwerty. The pain went mostly away but still persists.

It's always this meme, but emacs is so badly made it doesn't let you do this, you have to literally swap the keys for your entire OS.

Not an argument.

First, all software is shit when it comes to keyboard input (at least on UNIX). I still catch myself surprised when fucking mpv ignores the key presses only to remember that I forgot to switch my layout. Second, there's a reason Apple replaced Control with Command in such shortcuts like copying, cutting and pasting. It's simply retarded to use your weakest finger for combinations you use every five seconds.

In Emacs for X you can just do this:(custom-set-variables '(x-ctrl-keysym 'meta) '(x-meta-keysym 'ctrl))

Not an argument, emacs is a text editor, not a video player or anything else, not only is Emacs a text editor, it's a text editor that is meant to be used keyboard only.

Hmm, why do I smell bullshit?, even if "it works", I'm betting there is a catch and you're not telling me.

Next browser isn't a very attractive project if you're an actual Emacs user, because Emacs prefers programs that can be embedded into it, like Suckless' Surf via exwm-surf.el or w3m via w3m.el.

From my own perspective, Next is no different in terms of assimilation into Emacs than Firefox–which is to say, you can get it to work by leveraging Firefox's body of extensions to sort of do everything on par with what you could already do much better in Emacs, but it doesn't change the fact that most browsers are unwarranted kitchen sinks. Same with Qutebrowser and basically any other traditional browser. Emacs is already a kitchen sink. Two sinks in a kitchen isn't useful, just means you're 2x as likely to have plumbing issues and a massive water bill thereby. The difference between Emacs and other kitchen sinks is that Emacs knows how to assimilate itself with other programs, operating systems, and desktop environments seamlessly.

Even in terms of Emacs-esque browsers, Next is nothing compared to Conkeror. And Conkeror wasn't even successful. Next is only superficially extended Clisp. It doesn't change the nature of websites, webengines, or even the web itself, which is that it all revolves around html and js. And Conkeror is extended in js. That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

It works only in X. The terminal version of Emacs will still have Ctrl as Control and Alt as Meta.

Actually, it's a very common misconception that Emacs is purely keyboard-oriented and not accessible to people who need to interface with it in other ways. Emacs is actually really good with that kind of stuff because user input is abstracted that makes different interface more permissible. For example, if you're one-handed, you can use peddles for modifier keys or just 100% peddles altogether the way that transcribers do it. You can literally change the entire interaction paradigm you need to operate functions, thus why we have Evil-mode and Spacemacs.

Emacs is also interface-able by voice. Combined with one of the three high-quality completion modes available in Emacs specifically for basic text input, you can get a pretty high wpm using strictly voice interface, and all Emacs functions are still accessible to you, so you're never trapped or forced to rely on someone else in order to refine your experience. This is great for people with arthritis or no limbs. There's a video on YouTube that shows you how to do it.

If you're blind, Emacs has a very sophisticated audio desktop. Besides its quality, it's also the most thorough desktop on the market, just by nature of the scope of Emacs. And, yes, you can actually use Emacs to play videos. You can embed an mpv window into an Emacs buffer via EXWM and issue commands to an mpv session via emms. This is true for a lot of media players, including vlc, ogg123, and mpd. I prefer to listen to my music via mpv, because Emacs handles all of my music management. You can also browse the web. I browse the web mostly via w3m, although, for this site specifically, I'm writing this post via Emacs and then pushing it to Surf via exwm-edit. I can then in turn use all my favorite Emacs bindings to control Surf via EXWM's simulation keys. Naturally, this broad scope of abilities is very useful for blind people, as Emacs' audio desktop can represent it all. So Emacs is very use-able to blind people, too.

And, of course, if you're a blind and limbless, you can use both of those devices together and have a very comparable experience to that of a normal Emacs user. If you're blind, limbless, and mute, there's probably no helping you unless you have a webcamera and one of those eye trackers. Fortunately, keypresses in Emacs are assigned functions in precisely the same way as keypresses, so it's theoretically feasible to navigate Emacs solely by mouse, although it might be slow. To be fair, most mouse navigation is unnecessarily slow.

As for as "bullshit" goes, Elisp is very technically limited. For text, it works fast enough, but I found that playing gifs in Emacs, while decent in a single buffer, can't really be done on a large scale. That has less to do with the limitations of Lisp and more to do with the fact that Emacs is intended to be highly-portable, thus not getting a lot of feature-improvements or optimization that would be exclusive to a Unix platform.

The tradeoff is that Emacs is consummately integrated. Even for non-Elisp programs, if they're good Unix programs, they can be assimilated into Emacs workflow discreetly, and you might never even know, as with w3m.el. Most Emacs modules can be applied to other modes that weren't even intended by their creator. The benefit of this is that very little effort in Emacs gets wasted, and more Universal packages like Helm are extremely mature for the few resources put in.

I think this is the longest way of saying “Emacs is not an editor” I've ever seen so far.

Actually, I still consider Emacs to be solely a text editor.

You're not alone.

"One weekend I visited Richard Stallman at MIT and I was shocked to learn that he could no longer type. He was given strict instructions by his doctor to not touch a computer keyboard for 6-12 months, and that if he did, he may lose forever his ability to type. He was a programming pioneer, and at the time, his symptoms were not well known or understood. We all came to understand that it was RSI—repetitive stress injury, exacerbated by the very keystroke combinations that made the Emacs editor such a powerful programming environment. But the root cause was not Emacs—it was the punative design of the QWERTY keyboard, a legacy of the industrial era when complex keyboard mechanisms were not able to keep up with the speed of human fingers..."

ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html

I have to wonder if Stallman ever changed his key bindings or just stubbornly continued... I'm not sure if he's written anything in the past 20 years besides his political notes.

Reminded me of this shit: ergoemacs.org/misc/rms_emacs_tyrant_2018-03.html

LOL look at these UNIX faggots who can't use shift as a modifier for _fucking programming_ because they need to type an upper case letter in some of their identifiers

To be honest, a shift modifier is just as bad as Ctrl or Meta, because you're ultimately still pushing down with your pinky. Plus, that statement makes little sense when most people have caps lock freely available to them. Granted, you're not extending your pink the way some people do with Ctrl, but, frankly, I think the people who do extend their pinkies are kind of dumb. Literally just reorient your hand or curl your pinky like most people do it. Notwithstanding, it's probably a better idea to get an ergonomic or ortholinear keyboard and use modifiers with your thumb. Using your thumb nixes the issue altogether. That's what I plan to do once I decide on an ortholinear board. In fact, I never understood why people used bindings like "backspace" (which I bind to C-h and is natively supported by Bash) or tab (which a similar function is by default binded to C-i). You don't really need keys that call actual functions with Emacs, so just replace their unneeded space with modifiers. Possibly even shift the keys around so the center column is available for modifiers. That's a possible solution.