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abstractfactory | 15 years ago

Thread hijack...

If you use Emacs all day on a Mac, what do you use for the Meta key? I find I'm not really happy no matter what I do. If I make Option into Meta, I have to bend my thumb way under my palm to hit Meta. If I make Command into Meta, then I lose access to lots of global Mac UI shortcuts. I guess I could experiment with swapping Option and Command and then using Option as Meta, although I'll have to retrain a lot of muscle memory.

And then there's the fact that one Emacs window in a terminal is still not as productive as five Emacs windows under X11, and X11.app still sucks, and the various native Mac Emacs ports still don't feel right to me.

Overall I find using Emacs on Linux X11 still provides the best Emacs experience. This alone will probably keep me on Linux as my primary work environment for the foreseeable future.

discuss

order

pnathan|15 years ago

For me-

* Meta is mapped to the Command key (and the option key). * Control is mapped to control. * I suppose I should try to remap the Fn key to be Control to really make it work right instead of the weird curve that currently has to happen.

When I really am interested in getting typing done I hook up a MS Natural 4K. It's a much more pleasant experience. My keybindings are customized for maximum ease there (and believe me, my hands/wrists do not hurt after a long-term coding session there). Laptops are fine for messing around for a while, but after a period of typing my hands hurt.

hollerith|15 years ago

I use Escape because it is in exactly the same place on almost all PC and Mac keyboards. Yeah, I know that Escape is not a proper modifier key.