[pyrhho]

How does he use Emacs without Ctrl, or Alt?

edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|" key?

[Ogre]

Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.

[cmckay]

Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

[deltasquared]

Also there is the totally useless capslock key, it could be mapped to meta just fine ^_^

See point 1 on Steve Yeggies's list of things to consider with emacs.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

[jlgreco]

Maybe his keyboard is modal, but we never see it change. ;)

[jcl]

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches :)

[esrauch]

He could have remapped the keys arbitrarily, and he also could have used unicode input methods to type | with more than one keystroke.

[fafner]

https://github.com/greboide/emacs-gestures

[martinced]

For what it is worth I use an "otaku" Happy Hacking KeyBoard Pro 2 (HHKB Pro 2) with "blank" black keys and I remapped | to HYPER+[ (and I'm of course using right alt as a "new" modifier, HYPER).

tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )