I've had the most success with emacs-plus [1]. It's the most optimized for mac specifically with some good flags that you can make a custom build if there are features you do or don't want.
It's a more expensive answer, but I run my Apple TV through the HDMI passthrough of my receiver so I can have audio play without the TV actually being on. It's the closest I have come to the Express days. More commonly I just go bluetooth to the receiver as I live in a small apt
This happened to my machine! It fried almost all my peripherals including causing my USB keyboard to spark and smoke (ruining a $300 HHKB). After a bunch of frustration and a long week, Apple just replaced the logic board, but I am afraid the problem will return. I recommend bringing your computer in on any sight of weird shocks or sounds before all your data is fried.
Tramp mode in emacs is the closest I have seen to something like this. The dream is a beefed up cloud server hosting and executing code, while you just use your local resources to run emacs
Many years ago, I came across the term "emacs pinky". I thought it was joke, until I got a job as a programmer where I was lucky enough to have free choice of editor, so emacs it was.
My memory is a little hazy on the "when", but I think some 6-12 months after starting at that company, I noticed my left pinky did indeed kind of hurt. Reaching for that Ctrl-key on the far, far left front of the keyboard was getting a nuisance. The "emacs pinky" was real!
I did a bit of research on the Internet and found a piece of text that said, Ctrl used to be where CAPS LOCK lives now, oh, and here's how to make your CAPS LOCK into an additional Ctrl key (I cannot remember a single time I used CAPS LOCK, so I did not exactly miss it). I made the change and found it more comfortable right away.
To this day, the first thing I do on a new computer I am going to use for longer than, say, a week, is to make that little change. My pinky has not had any problems since.
Indeed, the Emacs pinky got me started on a life-long interest in [ergonomic] keyboards. The best solution I have found so far is the Kinesis Advantage where Control is moved from the weakest finger (pinky) to the strongest (Thumb). I also swapped delete and Alt (Meta) so the thumb is use for Meta as well. Fixed all my problems!
Incidentally I _also_ switched to Dvorak too, but only for that keyboard. Works great because muscle memory "feels" the keyboard is different and uses the correct layout without cognitive overhead.
I've started using my palm/the left side of my hand to press ctrl and it works really well, provided you are working on a keyboard with raised keys, not so easy on a laptop.
For me, symmetric C- and M- provides a good layout because I can use either hand for C- or M- and the other for the additional keypress. Having one on either side of the spacebar but asymmetricly located is ok, but not as good.
I have found that having only one C- key on the keyboard becomes uncomfortable over time. For example C-a and C-e and C-x and C-f contort my hand more with only a left hand C- key...looking for this in a keyboard is one of the things I learned from Xah's site.
Yeah, C-n is just _perfect_ to reach. Just thinking of it makes my arm twitch and glow with pain. I am starting to suspect that Emacs original keybinding designer (Richard?) is actually an octopus.
He had a keyboard with important keys on both sides of the spacebar because the assumption was that a user would interact with the computer in sophisticated ways such as or similar to programming. Most current keyboards are designed for cost saving or consumption or just by copying mediocre designs that are common.
I write software for 20 years, I use Linux and OS X as my primary development desktop OS, I have used Slackware Linux 1.0 back in 1995, I am a touch typist — but I just can't stay using Vim or Emacs, unless forced to (such as when I have to quickly edit something on a remote machine).
Yes, I might be a special snowflake — most developers don't have problems with vim or Emacs, expect for occasional flame wars between the two. But I do, even as I tried to make the switch like 20 or more times.
My comment was only to clarify that the keyboards have changed over the years and that historically, there was a more rational basis for the keybinding ergonomics than it might seem today. Part of the reason that Emacs is configurable is that there were lots of different keyboard layouts many years ago and the design view was that there is no one right way. One of the things I like about Emacs is that the philosophy of many right ways is consistent with mine and I don't think there is one right way of editing text and hence there is no one right text editor.
What I like about Emacs is that I can use it with just about any programming or semi-programming language I come across without having to learn a new IDE or editor. The other thing I like is that the capability ceiling of the tool is so high that I am constantly making significant progress in terms of efficiency. So the cost of learning it, was and is worth it for me. If I was writing Java or C# or Pharo most of the time, I'd probably uses different tools.
Why would you even try to make a switch to Emacs? It's kind of ok as a text editor, but, by default, it's nothing special. The default keybindings are stupid all the time they aren't malicious, that's true, and it has other problems, like archaic UIs (eg. completion, M-x, Speedbar).
The situation changes drastically once you account for two things:
1. The plugins. I said it many times already here on HN, but my Emacs is running 900k loc of Elisp, where more than 500k loc are plugins (or extensions, applications, and libraries). When modern packaging systems appeared, for both Emacs and Vim, their ecosystems were already formidable - it only got better since then.
2. Customization. It's not, in my opinion, worth learning Emacs if you're not going to customize it. The defaults are awful, that's one of the few things I agree with Xah on. But the ease of configuration and extension makes up for it if you're willing to put some hours into it. Not into "learning Emacs", but into "learning how to customize Emacs". The latter - if you're a programmer - is also more fun than memorizing arbitrary keybindings which don't necessarily make any sense for your keyboard, hand size and other factors.
It's, of course, a trade-off, as you have to put some effort into it and you're starting from a rather low point. You could try one of Emacs "starter kits", but, honestly, they involve just as much memorization as the vanilla version and (as mentioned) I don't find it fun at all.
Still, the smoothness of your workflow that you can achieve with Emacs once you do customize it is astonishing. It's still not pretty like VSCode (just one example I recently played with), but it doesn't have almost any limitations to what it can do with a single press of a key. It can make minutes or sometimes hours of your work time collapse into seconds (well, as long as you tell it how).
If you didn't already - if anything I wrote here is news to you - you could give Emacs another try. Of course, if you're not opposed to spending some time tinkering with it until it feels just right.
In my experience yes, most people do touch type, and no, most people don't use right control much, if at all. The right control key on many keyboards is already so uncomfortable to reach that even single-hand chording with the left hand feels better. Using caps lock as the control key makes it even easier to completely avoid the right control key.
However, I have also seen mention of people remapping return to the right control key, then doing who knows that to still be able to press return.
The cheapest solution is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard <$40 US with symmetric keys. For laptops, most Thinkpads have symmetric keys. Others, such as Dell Precisions have left and right control and alt keys, but they are not symmetric...better than one though.
Speaking of touch typing, the TrackPoint between g and h is also helpful. Thinkpads and Dell Precisions typically have one. Some Toshiba's also. Though this sort of assumes that keyboard is a primary driver for a laptop purchase.
I don't understand your questions. What would touch typing have to do with it?
And you can still use right control when typing a letter with the left hand. When pressing control-<right-hand-letter> you have less stretching. I've subconsciously over time found that I mostly do single-handed cording with control-<left-hand-letter> though since the control location is so much more convenient than the shift location (for me). Your milage may vary!
While I certainly do touchtype, I never taught my right hand to contort itself to reach control or shift. I occasionally press right alt with my thumb, but that's about it.
Mapping caps to control makes my keyboard a bit more usable, but it is still fundamentally flawed in a variety of ways.
That is probably one of the reasons ergodox (or similar) is so appealing to me.
This fact alone, after several years of changing schema and migrations, led to us having major rewrites and porting over to much more hands off approach. It's an understatement how much AR has led to just confusion especially with new employees!
